In Chapters 22 and 23, Anthropogeny has already outlined some of the theories that Homo developed about himself indirectly, by the mere fact that he spoke and produced literary works, or that he confronted his esthetic, economic, political, and linguistic conflicts. Yet, in around 1900, there came a time when Homo took himself as an object of study in a direct, contemplative way.

To understand this sudden need for “human sciences”, we should recall the development of the theory of evolution, which encouraged us to consider Homo as a link among living beings whose phylogenesis, ontogeny, and subgroup divisions, as well as a few constant organizational peculiarities, had to be specified. On the other hand, nineteenth-century Archimedean physical chemistry had so profoundly revolutionized the theory of things that one might wonder if Archimedean psychosociology would not also revolutionize the theory of Homo, this very particular thing. Lastly, it should be mentioned that at this moment, WORLD 3 was starting to break away from WORLD 2, which – whether rationalist or empiricist – had prevented any experimental psychosociology by supposing that “thought” could capture itself well enough by introspection.

24A. Archimedean psychosociologies

When, 2.3 thY ago, Archimedes pioneered a science involving the pure indexing of the pure indexables of the Universe <21D1>, neither he nor anyone around him would have thought of extending to the theories of Homo a method that for almost a millennium and a half would encounter fierce resistance in the theory of things itself. And even during the first decisive triumph of Archimedeanism in mechanics in the 17th century, as Descartes pointed out in his Treatise Passions of the Soul that human emotions and feelings had imperative anatomical and physiological substructures, who would have dared argue that he was inaugurating true Archimedean psychology? And neither did Condillac when he published his Treatise on Sensations (1754). The phrenology and mesmerism of the early 19th century did not change anything in this respect.

24A1. Experimental psychology

Thus, it was only around 1880, at a time when Romanticism and its self-constituting conception of the “I” <30I> were reaching their crepuscular apex with Nietzsche, that Wundt founded the first official laboratory for experimental psychology in Leipzig. Driven by the idea of progress, Homo initially conceived it as an exact science of his learning. He soon identified the role of progressive or gestalt graspings, Pavlovian and operant conditioning (trial and error), maturation and motivation. In the same vein, he sought to understand the strengths and limitations of his visual, auditory, tactile, and olfactory performances, as well as the development of his concepts, in an epistemic to which Piaget's name remains attached. In the second half of the 20th century, advances in linguistics prompted Homo to look more closely at the stages and more importantly the nature of language learning (The Emergence of Language, SA, Freeman, 1991).

These investigations played an anthropogenic role in changing Homo's self-understanding. Genetic psychology helped Homo to understand the extent to which each hominian specimen is a delicate and hazardous construction from birth, or even from gestation onwards. Spitz monitored the development of “no” and “yes” in children, and tried to justify the incessantly repetitive childish “why”. Laroche and Petre-Quadrens observed the precociousness of a certain smile in infants and were astonished by its concordance with REM sleep. Since 1950, the pioneering factorial analysis has revealed that hominin specimens are not single subjects (classical substances) endowed with clear-cut “faculties” (memory, intelligence, will). Instead, by gathering their performances in all directions, we can only identify correlations pointing to prevalent factors that give each one an idiosyncrasy <26E1>; that thus each one displays a completely singular intelligence, memory, and will, or rather that Homo possesses a myriad of different types of intelligence, of memories, wills, which makes everyone into an original assembling. Since 1980, brain imaging has revealed the different conditions of the two sexes regarding orgasmic dispositions or recoveries from cranial trauma; the different nature of primary dialects (constructive) and secondary dialects learned after adolescence (constructed by rules); the importance of the brain tissue devoted to face recognition <3E>, etc.

All this together is not to be underestimated, particularly with regard to the recent studies on language. However, an anthropogenist will be surprised that a science that has involved tens of thousands of researchers with so many credits for over a century has yielded so scant results. It is perhaps because it is nowhere so difficult to know what is proven and what is not. For example, dozens of experiments and theories have been put forward to explain why the Moon appears larger when it is near the horizon. Piaget's protocols for his epistemic are long, tortuous and raise countless questions. Studies on the languages of monkeys sum up all these ambiguities. In their groundbreaking Scientific American article of October 1972, Teaching Language to an Ape, Ann James and David Premak described how their monkey Sarah had gradually acquired the ability to move arbitrarily configured tags that referred to “nouns, verbs, conditionals, adjectives, concepts, analysis”. She wrote: “She learned the concept not name of. Thereafter Sarah could be taught new nouns by introducing them with name of”. However, the question remained – as has been noted a hundred times and unnecessarily – whether there were ever a “name”, a “verb”, a “concept”, an “analysis” of any kind for Sarah, or only in her experimenters. Sarah proved that she could lend herself to very complex experimentation, but she never seems to have experimented with anything herself, which is precisely what any child learning a dialect <17B> does. And when we read elsewhere that bees learn to recognize useful flowers by a categorization of color, we are no less worried.

Moreover, there is another, more fundamental limitation of experimental psychology. Being archimedean and thus indexing purified indexables, it leaves out of its scope nearly everything that is specifically hominin in Homo: (a) the emergence of a transversalizing, orthogonalizing, lateralizing, and thus techno-semiotic body in the Universe <1A>; (b) the articulation of indexes <5> and indicia <4>, or indexed indicia; (c) the perceptive-motor and logico-semiotic field effects <7>; (d) the relations of functionings to presence-absence <8>; (e) possibilization and allostasis <6> (e.g., Hebb's attraction-repulsion model is strictly homeostatic); not to mention a general view of the brain <2> and of the originality of the encounter <3>. In short, almost all the bases of an anthropogeny.

24A2. Statistical sociology

The successes of the statistical approach to thermodynamics since 1850 attracted the attention of Quetelet and others to the fact that, when applied to large populations, the techno-semiotic systems that compose Homo were undoubtedly accessible by the same method. And, indeed, the most seemingly individual behaviors, right up to that of killing oneself (caedere sui), proved to rely on social regulations in their frequency as well as in their patterns. In 1897, Durkheim published Le Suicide. The same statistical coherences have been confirmed in birth rates, and electoral, religious, nationalist, and internationalist preferences. They have contributed material to the study of social catastrophes such as crashes and revolutions (C. Zeeman).

However, statistical sociology proved itself even more limited than experimental psychology. Not only does it share the same limitations as experimental psychology, it also has some of its own: (a) truly new phenomena usually escape the scrutiny of statisticians, who are often akin to botanists surveying conifers in a forest where hardwoods are beginning to take hold. (b) The phenomena measured are usually ignored in their being: the researcher whose bell-shaped and S-shaped curves describe the evolution of the “family”, “art”, “religion” and “gambling”, suggests that he knows what family, art, religion and gambling are, when in fact he does not know – or worse still – only has a vague idea of them. (c) Even more so than in experimental psychology, the significant here is questionable, and only the trifling is genuinely established: “Children from modest backgrounds have less access to higher education than children from wealthy backgrounds.” (d) The opinions expressed in surveys, which are the only ones taken into account, do not indicate what people think, and even less whether they think anything at all. The thinking, which is obvious for WORLD 2, is questionable in WORLD 3.

However, the 20th century statistical sociology played a considerable anthropogenic role. Not by revealing what is taking place, but by helping to make it happen. The opinion polls conveying popularity ratings and voting intentions either identify parties, or make people believe that there are parties, a “common mistake” <23C1> indispensable in democracies. They even partly account for a very singular phenomenon, i.e., that in elections of 50 or 200 million inhabitants like we find in the U.S.A., the outcome is often determined by 52/48 or even 51/49 scores, by successive adjustments of opinions.

24A3. Galilean sociology

The heavily industrialized Second World War forced hominid specimens to quickly screen large populations suitable for defined tasks: aviation, artillery, infantry, rescue, and supply. For example, they had to decide how they should arrange their fighters or bombers in a squadron to obtain the best group performance.

In response to this last question, Kurt Lewin introduced a calculation that he himself called Galilean, and which mostly evokes Leibniz’s parallelogram of forces, as it measures the efficiency of a team by indexing the attractions and repulsions that exist between its members. Since then, this approach has been used in the management of both military and commercial organizations. Whether its effectiveness is real or assumed, it reinforced the notion that each individual has by no means the faculties and autonomy that WORLD 2 gave him, that he is a factorial constellation (affected by factor analysis <24A1>), and that he functions as a relay of networks, as per the generalized engineering view of WORLD 3.

24B. Radical psychosociologies

Around 1900, the emerging human sciences were undergoing a crisis of foundations, which Archimedean theories of things, naïve since 1600, had spent three centuries before encountering. We can see in this an echo of the crisis that was taking place in physics, chemistry, mathematics and logic. Or an echo of the upheaval that the transition from WORLD 2 to WORLD 3 produced in painting, sculpture, music, dance and architecture. Or simply a certain maladjustment of the Archimedean method (pure indexing of pure indexable things) to the Homo object, as we have just discerned from the overview of Archimedean psychology and sociology.

24B1. Peircean and Wittgensteinian semiotic movements

In an attempt to establish foundations, it would have been surprising for Homo not to have realized first that he was the signed and signing animal. And that, when he thinks, all his thoughts are composed of signs. Therefore, a radical theory of the sign had to be developed. Wasn't the theory of the sign, semiotics, the fundamental theory for both Homo and things?

Since 1870, the systematic explorer of this terra incognita of the sign, hitherto only occasionally visited on the occasion of something else, such as ontology or epistemology, was at hand: the American Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914). His father was a mathematician with a passion for logic and the phenomenology of mental operations. Father and son spent entire nights exploring the intricacies of their minds. As a logician, he took the first steps into what would become the essential themes of the logical revolution of the 1900s. But his own logic always aimed at reality. For thirty years, he worked at the Coast and Geodetic Survey, while simultaneously delighting in those bodily movements that sustain the diction of a poetic text. Let us state his central concern: there must be something objective in the (universal) concepts of genus and species. In other words, nominalism, which was so fruitful in exact sciences – which he practiced – and which influenced the psychology of John Dewey and William James – whom he admired – seemed insufficient to him. The Medieval Realists were correct, signs are not mere conventions, and their designates are not mere referents; there is a certain “distinctio formalis a parte rei” (an aspect of the formal distinction comes from the thing itself) as Duns Scotus would say. Peirce called himself “a scholastic realist of a somewhat extreme stripe” and eventually replaced the word “pragmatism” – which he had helped popularize – with “pragmaticism”, hoping that it would be “ugly” enough to differentiate himself from James and Dewey, the so-called “pragmatists”, and thus forestall any latent nominalism.

One could have thought that Peirce would build a fundamental anthropology, and even an anthropogeny. But, according to an ambiguity in English that was further fanned by the American transcendentalism of Emerson, Poe and Whitman, the creator of semiotics did not differentiate between the indicium, which goes from object to subject, and the index, which goes from subject to object, and covered them both with the single term index. Moreover, in accordance with his Trinitarian obsession (as a logician, he argued that logic becomes fecund with 3, not with 1, nor 2), he then differentiates three types of signs: icons, indexes (indicium=indexes), symbols; so that the universe seems to him to hold in a Firstness (the qualities, rendered by the “icons”), a Secondness (the forces, manifested by the “indicia-indexes”), a Thirdness (the laws, written in the “symbols” of physics). However, the more categories of signs he increases, the more confusing they become, even for him. In the end, he despairs – with tears in his eyes – of having his “medieval realism” (Scotiste) understood, even by John Dewey, even by William James, the steadfast friend. Especially, as far as his articulation of the sign into Object/Idea/Interpretant is concerned, as to how to express the latter, this “quasi-mind”: to call it “a person” is “a sop to Cerberus, because I despair of making my own broader conception understood.”

Two generations later, the background of the Austrian Wittgenstein (1889-1951) would share several characteristics with Peirce's: he studied engineering (aeronautics); he went straight to the fundamentals of mathematics and logic; he always had a penchant for formalized and everyday languages; he had a consistent penchant for (mystical) contemplation and asceticism (Peirce had written: “as to God, <. ..> open your eyes and you see him”); and he had a problematic relationship with the academic institution. But his Jewish ancestry, his homosexuality, and the fact that he wrote both in German (where he was considered a proper writer) and in English (where his translators trivialize and sometimes distort him) probably reinforced his perception of the cultural ambiguities of languages. He favors expression in boxes (modules) <17B2>, in aphorisms. The ones he enumerates from 1 to 7 in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus state that there are four kinds of propositions: (a) those which paint a minimal “Sachverhalt” (state of affairs, “atomic fact”), and are true if this state is true and they render it; (b) those which correctly combine minimal (“atomic”) propositions, and have the same value as them; (c) those that are true regardless of the truth or error of the propositions they combine; they are the “tautological” propositions of mathematics and formal logic; (d) those that we find in morals, esthetics, and philosophies, and that comprise uncontrollable, unshowable elements, and consequently do not even truly make sense.

How should we approach these last propositions? The 7th and last aphorism of the 1921 Tractatus is explicit: “7. - What cannot be spoken of must be kept silent.” For, in this case, the answers are irrelevant, the questions are irrelevant, and so is the skeptic’s doubt. So Wittgenstein the philosopher will remain silent, spending two years building a house for his sister and practicing his architectural skills, or retiring often to his Norwegian retreat. However, he will continue to speak and write as a philosopher. To gather and analyze certain propositions from everyday language, “Sprachspiel”, such as “Ich Weiss es” (I know), “Schau näher hin” (Look closer), etc. These language games possess two qualities: 1) They demonstrate that language is not one, and comprises various “families” of words: An intelligent way of dividing up a book on philosophy would be into parts of speech, kinds of words. 2) To provoke, by delineating the language games, an “elucidation” of language, and at the same time a “right vision of things”. This task would become the subject of the Philosophische Untersuchungen. The latter were almost ready for publication when Wittgenstein died in 1951. The book was published in 1953.

In view of the present anthropogeny, these two initiators of semiotics and semantics showed a keen interest in conceiving signs, which make Homo, realistically, in what Peirce calls Object and Wittgenstein calls Sachverhalt, and by no means conceive them as a self-sufficient interplay of Signifiers and Signifieds linked to an almost extrinsic Referent, as is the case with Saussure and his followers <24B2>. Furthermore, the former turned around the distinction indicium/indexes - and thus around the fundamental epistemological articulation that are indexed-indicium <4-5>; the latter turned around the initial distinction functionings/presence (in music, he favored Schubert <15G3>), and hence around the distinction Reality/Real <8E1>. If these two positions failed to take, for both of them, the decisive character one might expect, if both initiators remain superficial in spite of their desire for depth, it is partly because neither recognized the perceptive-motor and logico-semiotic field effects <7A>, which are essential mechanisms of anthropogeny; and this is true both in their theory of art and of belief.

However, in the work of both Wittgenstein and Peirce, two things firmly herald WORLD 3. A degree of pragmatism, i.e., a relationship between knowledge and the use of a word: “Eine Bedeutung eines Wortes ist eine Art Seiner Verwendung” (A meaning of a word is a kind of employment of it). And thus also an assessment of knowledge not concerned with a Cartesian starting point (Das system ist nicht so sehr der Ausgangspunkt), nor with axiomatic rules, which leave back doors open (Unsre Regeln lassen Hintertüren offen, und die Praxis muss für sich selbst sprechen), but concerned with a plausible sheaf of judgments (Ein Ganzes von Urteilen wird uns plausibel gemacht), many of which are initially simple beliefs for children (Das Kind lernt eine Menge Dinge glauben), where a classification of relevance and coherence is gradually established, and finally, a rotation axis of stable propositions (Die Sätze, die für mich festehen), the stability of which is determined by the movement of the other judgments: “Diese Achse steht nicht fest in dem Sinne, dass sie festgehalten wird, aber die Bewegung um sie herum bestimmt sie als unbewegt” (This axis is not fixed in the sense that anything holds it fast, but the movement around it determines its immobility). Written in 1950, these statements clearly presage the epistemology of most scientists in the second half of the twentieth century, and particularly the “cross bracing” of physicists <21F2>. We have placed them in the epistemological framework of anthropogeny in the chapter on logics <20Bend>.

It is often said that there were two successive philosophies of Wittgenstein. This is perhaps a failure to understand correctly neither the first nor the second. Generally speaking, a brain has only one topology, one cybernetics, one logico-semiotics, one presentivity <11I3>, and brilliant brains more than others. His dealings with Russell, for example, show that he never shared the naiveties of the axiomatists.

24B2. Structuralism

Structuralism began in linguistics. We saw, on the occasion of linguistics <23D>, that around 1900 Saussure (1857-1913) believed that he had identified languages as systems with a structure under living words. These systems, made of language signs now defined as the union of a Signifier and a Signified (concept), Sa/Sé, had struck him as very autarkic vis-à-vis the Referents of these signs, hence the external order of things, much like what was happening in Physical Theory according to Mach-Poincaré at the same time. Before targeting a Designated - as Homo had always believed, and as Peirce and Wittgenstein would continue to maintain - one word was first supposed to be semantically differentiated from other words of the same dialect: “in language there are only differences”, even binary differences, probably reducible one day to 0/1 choices, ready to be handled by Boolean algebras. The comprehension of a language's system was thus primarily synchronic; while not excluded, its diachronic study would therefore be postponed, in the same way as its “esthetic” effects. The greatest achievement of this approach was the matrix of twelve “features” drawn up by Jakobson-Halle to identify all the phonemes of known languages <16A1>.To this Fillmore added a panoply of syntactic “features”, that he also believed to be universal. As for the systems of semantic “features”, they remained programs, and for good reason <17B>.

We have already encountered all of this in connection with linguistics, as part of Homo’s urgent theories <23D3b>. Now, therefore, we shall focus on the way in which this view, which was indirectly supported by the axiomatization of the Bourbaki group in mathematics in the 1930s, spread to ethnology through Lévi-Strauss. The latter read D'Arcy Thomson’s On Growth and Form, whose topological diagrams confirmed his ability to grasp homologies (vs. analogies) between objects, but also between social groups. He had been convinced by Marx that group structures are not conscious, that they cannot even be conscious without bringing society to a standstill, and that systems created by man can become almost autarkic and take him where he does not know. Concerning psychoanalysis, Lévi-Strauss always preferred Freud’s unconscious concatenations to Jung’s polysemous symbols. He showed no inclination towards phenomenology, which he termed a “philosophy for young girls”, particularly when it was meant to be existential, as in the work of Sartre. But it wasn't until, driven by the Second World War, Lévi-Strauss went to the United States, where he attended some of Jakobson’s classes, that the ultimate spark ignited. At last, he said, he could hear someone invoking, in the context of language, categories that he perceived in morals. Structural anthropology – whose name became the title of a collection of essays – was born.

24B2a. The contribution of structuralism to anthropogeny

Indeed, in the customs relating to marriage, food, sacrifice, furniture and art of the last “savages” that were observable in 1930, there were elements that, as in the languages seen by Saussure, seemed to refer to one another before having an objectal and phenomenological meaning or being explained by urgent functions and influences (borrowings by neighborhood). A synchronic approach would therefore yield results, as a few examples demonstrate, some from Lévi-Strauss himself, others from the vehicular cultural structuralism that he inspired. (a) Wetness does not have a universal link to the feminine, and dryness to the male, as Jung and others postulated, since in some regions where wetness is uncomfortable and dryness comfortable, men are on the side of wetness, and women on the side of dryness, and are thus enviable by them. (b) The adult intimacy between husband and wife and the infantile intimacy between brother and sister are neither natural nor unnatural, they compensate each other: in Western Europe, the former is strong and the latter is weak; the opposite is true in Arab Islam. (c) We often find the same compensations between the stages of life: the first education is tender while the rites of adolescence are severe, as with the Sioux of Erik Erikson; the opposite is true in the West, where adolescent rituals are gentle. (d) Intra-group differentiations and compensations also exist inter-group. For instance, the rules of intermarriage between two clans ensure that the female lineage alternates from one clan to the other while the male lineage remains intact. (e) For two neighboring Indian tribes in the Vancouver area, the open-mouth/closed-mouth and good/evil pairs operate in such a way that if “open” is “good” in one, it is “bad” in the other, and vice versa. Opposite forms have equal meaning; equal forms have opposite meanings.

Religions provided similar features to the comparative structuralist gaze. In 1977, we can read in Dumézil’s Les dieux souverains des Indo-Européens, in which he elaborates on his thesis of L’Idéologie tripartie des Indo-Européens of 1958: “In polytheism, a god – however important he may be – is generally only clearly defined in his relations with a certain number of other gods, by his place in an ordered whole, by his role in one or more mechanisms of which he is only a part.”

In other terms, social structures cannot be simply explained by allegedly obviated natural factors, such as sexual attraction, maternal instinct, paternal authority, warlike efficiency, technical urgency, etc., as some earlier ethnologists argued. Let us take the illustrative example of the prohibition of incest. “Savage” communities are often unaware of the dangers of endogamy, and sometimes of the link between copulation and generation. Therefore, the interdict of incest is a systemic performance, i.e., a supplement of homeostasis by a minimum of allostasis. This is all the difference between exclusion and prohibition; incest between mother and son is excluded in some species of apes, but prohibited among Homo. Some will even believe that this was the primordial prohibition, that which constitutes and declares the genus Homo <23C>.

However, it is only in abstract systems – such as axiomatized mathematics – that the structure exhausts the system. In concrete systems, there is a remnant. For society, this remainder is the myth, i.e., the language activity tasked with repairing the tears, holes and overhangs of the culture-nature articulations. Therefore, the myth is always in repetitions and extensions; none can be understood on its own; the interpretation of a myth is the myth that precedes it and the one that follows it. The first volume of Lévi-Strauss’s Mythologiques bears the dedication “To music”, because music is also about incessant readjustments and redevelopments. Moreover, there is another answer to the dehiscences between nature and culture: the mask, or the sculpture or the woven object, all of which are “scale models” of cosmic relations. (An anthropogeny would add: partial models, which only complete each other through the rhythm, the field effects that inhabit them, immovably in the sculpture, dynamically in the dance, both in the dancing mask).

For all that, structuralism cannot overlook diachrony, even if it focuses first on synchrony. Dumézil insists that, in order to understand Indo-European religions, it is not enough to identify a trinity of gods from the start, like in Rome: Quirinus (farmer, craftsman), Mars (warrior), Jupiter (decision-maker and supreme legislator). It is essential to find the “evolutionary tracks” (the chréodes, as Thom would say) that account for the previous and future states of the system. However, Dumézil admits that this is beyond us at the moment: “it will require, above all, enormous progress on the dynamics of cerebral structures that is unimaginable today. ” Moreover, he adds “let us be clear that, under the same conditions of time and space, other could have occurred, and did not.” Hence, structuralism will have powerfully attracted Homo’s attention about its own classifying, differentiating, oppositional, adversarial nature.

24B2b. Structuralism’s brakes on anthropogeny

It is all the more important for an anthropogeny to establish the limits of structuralism. Because they affect it fundamentally. And because they bluntly reveal some aspects of Homo theoretician in general.

(1) The erasure of field effects. – Through method or ignorance, strict structuralism disregards field effects, both perceptive-motor and logico-semiotic. Hence readings based on binary oppositions and simple combinatorics (Abraham Moles explained that Mondrian’s paintings were permutations of rectangles, and that they were therefore producable by a computer code coupled with a random cell; something similar was thought of for Bach’s fugues). Lévi-Strauss was sufficiently content to have seen that the adverbs, adjectives, nouns, and verbs in Baudelaire’s Les Chats were distributed oppositely by stanzas, without noting that they produced a singular topology, cybernetics, logico-semiotics, and presentivity, and thus a destiny-choice of existence <8H>. Jakobson also made short when noting the assonances and alliterations of Edgard Poe’s The Raven.

(2) The erasure of the nervous system. – Lévi-Strauss invokes the nervous system as often as Dumézil, but their generic declarations are never followed by actual applications. Although ostensibly driven by the anatomical-physiology of Homo, primates and mammals<2A>, the Open and the Closed, the Upper and the Lower, the Right and the Left, are for them hardly more than oppositional X, Y, Z, and therefore devoid of any particular significance. Phenomenology, as a description of the existential consequences of anatomo-physiology, is either ignored or scorned in one same breath. Therefore, the fantasized model of structuralism is mechanomorphic, never chemomorphic <21E2>. In other words, its scope is macroscopic (structural), limited to structures, never microscopic, attentive to textures and growths <7F>. In its perception of Evolution, variation disappears below selection, in opposition to Darwin's views, and to an even greater extent those of S.G.Gould today <21E2e>.

(3) The erasure of dialects and idiolects. – Going hand in hand with this surface macroscopic approach, the structuralist researcher readily works on texts of a dialect that he not only does not speak, but whose phonetic, semantic and syntactic structures, textures and growths he does not allege. Naively, he churns out translations of a few isolated native words, castrated of their manious phonosemia <16B2a>, supposedly matching our own “life”, “death”, “good”, “evil”, “god”, as though these terms had a universal sense, implicitly their French sense, a puzzling conclusion after Whorf's and Leenhardt's descriptions around 1940 of Hopi and Canaic logic <23D4>, and also structuralism's own demands on context and intertext. It is noteworthy that this doctrine, which is so logicist, and even mathematician when it comes to the Elementary Structures of Kinship, has never endeavored to describe the logics of argumentation <20D>, which are instrisically original, of the populations whose conceptual movements it purported to understand.

(4) The de-facto erasure of the diachronic. – Although diachronicity is not negated, and indeed assumes a powerful meaning through Dumézil’s “evolutionary ruts”, in La Voie des masques (1975) Lévi-Strauss contents himself with invoking undefined contacts between peoples to explain the current oppositions “inverse forms/same meaning, inverse meaning /same form”. The Culinary Triangle, which he wrote for the special issue of the journal “L’Arc”, goes as far as to include a sentence in which the difference in the courses of the meal is said to be “synchronic” and the order of the meal is said to be “diachronic”, whereas they are both synchronic, the first being “paradigmatic”, and the second “syntagmatic”.

(5) The contentment of the herbarium. – With such a restricted means of reading, structuralist comparatism has ranked cultural objects in a combinatory and superficial way without researching the factors of anatomy, nervous physiology, and techno-semiotics that support them. It is a sort of herbarium without supporting biology, if we agree with this comparison reassured by the flower (a wild pansy) that illustrates the cover of The Savage Mind. The example of the sacrifice <6G2,7G7> is a good one. In 1962, Lévi-Strauss opposed sacrifices to totemism in the following terms. (a) “For totemism, or so-called totemism, the relations are always reversible: in a system of clan appellations wherein both would appear, the ox would really be equivalent to the cucumber, in the sense that it is impossible to confuse them and that they are equally suitable for manifesting the differential gap between the two groups they respectively would connote.” (b) In sacrifices, however, “in the absence of the prescribed thing, any other thing can replace it, provided that the intention persists, which is the only thing that matters, and although the zeal itself may vary”; “as a sacrificial victim, a cucumber is worth an egg, an egg a chick”; “on the other hand, this gradation is orientated: for want of an ox, a cucumber is sacrificed, but the opposite would be an absurdity.” Luc de Heusch (1986), from whom we have borrowed these quotes from Lévi-Strauss, objects: “We shall see, however, that in Bantu societies, the principle of substitution only plays a role to a limited extent, which is itself defined by symbolic thought.” (in Le Sacrifice dans les religions africaines). But this author’s solidly supported argument also follows the structuralist herbarium, except in the final claim (known since Bergson’s “static morality”) that “sacrifice and trance allow men to establish communication with the gods, in order to survive, or to break it, in order to avoid death.”

In short, in the eyes of an anthropogeny, structuralism illustrated paroxysmally a constant trait of the hominian ethos, namely the taste for simple, two-dimensional, oppositional schemes deemed to be the basis of things: inversions, alternations, reversals, upside-down. Structuralism also illustrates that between two cultural periods – in this case WORLD 2 and WORLD 3 – there can be a short period of pure formalism. Structural anthropology belongs to the same period of annulment of meaning as Lacan’s Borromean knots and mathemes, as Derrida’s différAnce, as Barthes’s non-to-say and non-giving-to-see, or Moles’s reductions of the work of art to improbability, etc. At the same time, Deleuze extolled surfaces.

24B3. The phenomenological movement

Still circa 1900, at a time when Homo – caught between WORLD 2 and WORLD 3, or simply at a time when he was experiencing the crisis of the foundations of science and epistemology – wanted to start again from the beginning, another plausible approach was that of phenomeno-logy, the -logy of the appearing things (pHaïnomena). Husserl’s approach was radical, since he obliged himself, for the content of English and French conscience (scire, cum), or more precisely of the German Bewusstsein (Wissen-knowledge, sein-being, be-intensive objectifying), to “put their existence in brackets”, so as to reduce them to pure cogitata (cogitated), and then to see what their “essential”, “transcendental” structures were, insofar as they are cogitadas differentially perceived, imagined, desired, moving, remembered, etc. The phenomenality of phenomena had been extolled in the West since the amazement of Archilochus <22B3>, and gave rise to elaborate descriptions from Plotinus and Augustine to Hegel, to whom it inspired the title of the most sumptuous of all philosophical works, the very beethovenian Phänomenologie des Geistes. In 1950, the phenomenologist Thévenaz considered that the difference in principle between German and French philosophy is that the first starts from a prior and immense phenomenological field, rather than from a Cartesian clean slate.

And one could have expected that Husserl’s critical phenomenology would initiate a psychosociology of WORLD 3, or even a fundamental anthropology or anthropogeny. But the author of the Logische Untersuchungen continued to establish himself in the world/consciousness (Welt/Bewusstsein) couple of WORLD 2, and persisted in thinking that consciousness is so intimate to oneself, and in fact so memorizing, that it is sufficient, if not for aiming directly at oneself as in Descartes’ “cogito ergo sum”, at least for practicing a “cogito cogitate” producing cogitata-essences. In other words, there is no need to question the physicists and neurophysiologists around us. To ascertain the appearing things in their essence, it is simply a matter of transcendentally observing their modes of appearance. The following lines from the Husserl's Cartesianische Meditationen, translated by Levinas in 1931, are decisive: “Thus a science of an unheard-of singularity is offered to us. Its object is concrete transcendental subjectivity. It is radically opposed to the sciences as they have been conceived until now, that is to say, to the objective sciences. Here it is a question of a science that is in some way absolutely subjective, whose object is independent of what we can decide about the existence or non-existence of the world. The said science will therefore begin as a pure egology.” And if, in the last chapters, this egology thinks it can overcome solipsism, it is not through a substance of the world, as with Descartes or Hegel, but through a monadological intersubjectivity, as with Leibniz.

Even when it became existential in Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit, after having been transcendental in Husserl's work, phenomenology did not relinquish its self-sufficiency until the 'phenomenological ontology', that Sartre's Being and Nothingness was. In 1947, Sartre’s Esquisse d'une théorie des émotions (Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions) unambiguously asserts that nothing can influence a “conscience”. It alone can influence itself and move itself about the world, thus rendering any interest in the physiology underlying the emotions irrelevant. The unassimilable scandal is that a conscience can be born in the womb (“le c...”) of a woman, he confided in a letter to Simone de Beauvoir. Until its demise around 1960, phenomenology remained deaf to physiology, anatomy, paleoanthropology, rigorous historical views, the evolution of techniques, the discovery of DNA, in short, to the entire field of the hominian that is not accessible by remaining Cartesian “in one’s tower”, or around a table at the Café de Flore.

In this paroxysm of endotropy, Sartre’s Reflections on the Jewish Question is silent on the three thousand years of one of the most original cultures ever – namely the Hebraic culture – or on its cataclysmic contrasts with other cultures, particularly the western culture, in terms of esthetics, architecture, the logos/chaos couple, suffering, death, humor, etc. To the existentialist phenomenologist, Jews are invented by the anti-Semite, just as women are invented by men, just as Negroes are invented by whites, on the basis of the transcendental relations of the in-itself and the for-itself in a dominant and a dominated group, in a Hegelian-Marxian sense. The only realistic observation in the work concerns the relationship of Jews to money, perhaps because the neutral exchanger fits into the abstract/concrete pairing of existential psychoanalysis. This phantasmagoria is particularly astounding given that at that time, the first innovative works on Hebraism as the source of Christianity, but also as a singular civilization, were starting to appear. Sartre only acknowledged his error at the end, in a sort of conversion cleverly described by his last secretary, Benny Lévi (Le nom de l’homme, 1984).

However, for anthropogeny, phenomenology represented a major milestone. Here, like never before, Western Homo finally realized that his futile daily activities (those that the young Socrates did not want to take into account in Parmenides) made sense. This led to new observations on the distinctions between fear (with an object) and anxiety (without an object), caress and manipulation, sensation and perception, error and absurdity, football (Buytendijk), time and temporality, etc., which were beyond the reach of experimental psychology. In a metaphysical exploit that remains outstanding, Sartre boldly asked the question underlying the “gigantomachy around being” (Heidegger) that had driven the West: what is the being of consciousness? In 1945’s Being and Nothingness, the response – although not as important as the question – was just as vertiginous: a neantization. At the same time, presence was recognized as a component of conscience, foreshadowing WORLD 3 and the functionings/presence distinction <8A>.

It was in psychiatry, where the phenomenologist was thrown off his endotropic complacency by the tragedy and urgency of individual cases, that the results were most enlightening. In stark contrast to the sweeping judgments of Nietzsche – to whom he nevertheless professes to be greatly indebted – Karl Jaspers frequently made some of the most radical and widely shared observations about the nature of Homo: such as his historical notion of the “axial period”, and his metaphysical notion of the Umgreifende (encompassing). Or his reading of the most paradoxical hominian specimens: the Buddha, Socrates, Confucius, Jesus.

24B4. The psychoanalytic movement

In the same way as phenomenology, psychoanalysis could also have started a fundamental anthropology or anthropogeny during the 1900 Archimedean crisis of the foundations, and yet it did not do so either. The most instructive point will be to oppose this by which it announced WORLD 3, and in what way it pursued WORLD 2.

24B4a. The Freudian edifice. Its announcements of WORLD 3 & remanences of WORLD 2

Freud was more scientific – thus more skeptical – than his followers mostly were: the unconscious, what a hypothesis! Oedipus, what a narrative construction! Totem and Taboo, what a myth! The unpublished writings collected by Ilse Grubrich-Simitis under the title Zurück zu Freuds Texten show this very clearly. But we can also find traces of this when reading his well-known texts more carefully, such as in the reading put forward by Laurence Kahn under the title L’action de la forme, where she ultimately hopes that any work done during the session and in its interpretation should turn into a “chemistry of liaisons, unliaisons, reliaisons, that would no longer be alchemy.” Within the scope of an anthropogeny of the 20th century, the common reading of the Gesammelte Werke is particularly important, and we are now examining it.

(1) Here, the hominid situation is no longer the outcome of some timeless, Manichean or Platonic human essence, nor of an ontological and epistemological accident, like an original fall. It is due to the fact that Homo, like all living beings, is part of the Biological Evolution, where his ontogeny summarizes to varying degrees his phylogeny, according to Haeckel, who was very influential at the time.

(2) To understand how an animal organism can become semiotic, we must first examine the capacity of its nervous system to displace-substitute the objects of impulses, as well as the bodily regions most susceptible to topological and cybernetic significations, i.e., the orifices – and more specifically the sphyncter orifices: the mouth, the anus, the vulva and the penis – where the relationship between exterior and interior environments, as had just been defined by Claude Bernard, is modulated.

(3) However, things become complicated by the fact that signs, that Peirce studies at the same time, are first more analogizing (maternal), then more digitalizing (paternal). This bipolarity leads to the so-called Oedipus complex. For each homini specimen, this complex must first be resolved in the primary construction of language and then during adolescence.

(4) In this way, the semiotic construction of the German conscious – the Bewusst (wissen, be-), focally or transitively known – is not linear, as in Fichte and Hegel. It is disrupted by the pressure of physical or social events, and sometimes also by the deficiencies of individual nervous complexions. (a) In the worst cases, the individual is driven to establish himself outside reality (Realität). This is psychosis, characterized without hesitation as “loss of the feeling of reality”. (b) While, in the best case, the individual achieves various sublimations (Sublimierung). (c) And, in a range of intermediate positions, he establishes himself in the stagnations or retrogradations of perversion, or still in the circumventions and retorsions of neurosis, where organic cramps, slips of the tongue, and various missed acts translate the unbearable encounters between impulses (Triebe) and reality (Realität) into diverted accomplishments.

(5) Through all this, the hominian specimens are removed from the totalizations of the Greek noûs, the Stoic vastitudes of the Roman anima-animus, the penetrations of the Christian anima, the obviousnesses of rationalist thought and reason, the introspective returns of Hamiltonian consciousness, and the essentialities of the German Bewusstsein, all of which offered a centralizing and even summital vision (arx mentis) of themselves. It is not that Homo of the WORLD 2 did not perceive the shadows that surrounded or penetrated his Latin ipsity, but that they remained extrinsic and almost accidental to him, not affecting his essence. In contrast, in the two Freudian topics the shadows belong to the fabric, to the principle of the Psyche, which – it should be noted – has replaced the Pneuma-Psyche couple that accompanied the body of the Greeks. “The Ich (I) is no longer master in its own house.”

(6) The cure proved even more groundbreaking than the theory. In a remnant of confidence in WORLD 2, Freud initially believed that “awareness” would in itself be curative, that in order to be cured, the patient would only have to be able to “re-recognize” his true will and desire underneath his symptoms, which would be detected mainly through his free associations on fragments of the memories of his dreams (the dreams themselves being inaccessible). Besides the fact that the results obtained were disappointing, it became clear that the analyst was not the neutral operator he believed he was. He aroused and shifted phantasms into a transference (love or belief) for the patient and a counter-transference for himself. Distortion, but also retortion. The vivid inter-cerebrality of transference and counter-transference could become, through the chance of the treatment and external circumstances, the occasion of a rhythm and a horizon never before reached or accidentally lost. The initial analysis became the hazardous event of a session.

Having identified these contributions of psychoanalysis to the development of WORLD 3, an anthropogeny will identify the remanences of WORLD 2 in psychoanalysis.

(1) The model of the psyche remained globally homeostatic in the perspective of Greek antiquity and 19th century thermodynamics. In Freud’s view, pleasure remains a decrease in tension, which obliges him to consider desire as a lack, in a Platonic manner. And still in the Greek prestige of unity, naive pleasure is achieved in the repetition of the same and the first in a traditionally German way: “die Wiederkehr des Gleichen”.

(2) The model is so unitarian, or so Judaically refuses to mingle, that there is only one libido, male which is why female sexuality is the “dark continent” of psychoanalysis.

(3) The privileged sense remains sight. Ideally the mirror view, that of Narcissus on his own, while a radical psychosociology would have expected his fiancée Echo – the ancient figure of resonance, of the breath of music, of embodied language, of rhythmic existence and of an open horizon – to stand beside him. The entry “Musik” does not feature in the general index of the Gesammelt Werke, where Mozart or Wagner are only mentioned in connection with the words of their characters; the entry “Rhythmus” is no more extensive in this respect. Perceptive-motor field effects <9A-D> are completely ignored. Painting is only invoked for its representations reducible to language, or to the wordplay of language, or even to the wordplay of its author’s name. Thus Signorelli, this “signor” evoking “der Herr” that is death.

(4) Aristotle’s final cause remains vividly alive. Evolutionary phases (oralsadistische Phase, analsadistische Phase, phallische Phase) appear not only as strata but as stages that, through the continuity of orality (thesis) and the discontinuity of anality (antithesis), tend to an accomplishment (dialectical synthesis) of genitality. Perversions can thus be understood as interruptions or reversions in this evolution, and biological variabilities are often interpreted as perversions. For example, the homosexual – whose hormonal or semiotic development is on the fringe of the averages – is a pervert, and the young child in the process of libidinal elaboration, is a polymorphous pervert. Cleavages – the banal operations of hominian and animal brains <2A2>, are immediately understood as repressions. And even the dream, that cerebral digestion work so efficient because it is not oriented, is “finalized” towards the neurotic realization of desires. So much so that traumatic dreams – which ostensibly escape this realization – require, in Jenseits des Lustprinzips, a revision of the principle of desire-pleasure-desire.

(5) Even if the Western privilege of the mind as a summit (arx mentis) is definitively undermined, the Second Topical still arranges the psyche in a superposition of tiers: Es / Ich / Uber-Ich. The concept of sublimation (Sublimierung) marks the same phantasmatic convection from bottom to top. While, the reticular WORLD 3 is usually more horizontal than vertical.

(6) The body as body remains largely non-significant. The topology (and thus the phenomenology) of the sexual organs, and the singularities of the bisexual orgasm, and even of orgasm itself, summarily described as “gewaltig” (enormous, prodigious), are barely or not at all discussed, and even neutralized under the semi-abstract noun “Sexualität”. Admittedly, Wilhelm Reich was repudiated for his oddities, but probably primarily for stating that the “orgasmic” sensation was “melting” and had a “function” as such. With regard to the properties of the nervous system if they were ever considered, it was once and for all in the Entwurf of 1895. And still in such a conceptual fashion that, over the years, they did not trigger any fine-tuning. It is true that the obvious revolutions in neurophysiology occurred after 1950.

(7) In the relationship of the sexual Partition-Conjunction with the generalized Partition-Conjunction <7H2>, the latter is reduced to the former except for its role of sublimation. Yet the concept and the fantasy of Partition-Conjunction are never thematized as such, although they underlie the constant Freudian assertion, according to Marie Bonaparte, that in its fantasies of the primitive stage the child assimilates itself to the two mated adults.

(8) In the same Augustinian manner, interpretation (Deutung) pursues a profound, and even more profound and original meaning, an intentio profundior, by diachronically going back to the foundings. Hence, phylogenetically, the interpretative revisitation of Greek myths: Oedipus, Narcissus. And the creation of erudite myths <22B1a>: Totem and Taboo, Moses and monotheism. In addition, each interpretation is irrefutable since it can always claim in its defense slidings-displacements (Verschiebung), thickenings (Verdichtung), as well as negations (Verneinung) and repressions- punishments (Verdrängung) among the interpreters.

(9) The mother/father opposition remains a rather too convenient archetype for designating and establishing such diverse oppositions as near/far, contact/distance, analogy/digitality, even tenderness/authority, consolation/frustration, etc.

(10) The discourse unfolds as though all nervous systems, particularly perceptual and motor, were fairly similar. This explains the privilege given to “objects”, which are often hypostasized: phallus, breast, feces, the child produced. For example, a disciple wrote that Valéry's discomfort with coitus stemmed from a fear of the female sex (replaced in the symptom by the armpits), whereas in this instance it was probably the fear of a loss of autarky in a hypertrophied Western ego, described by Monsieur Teste and the correspondence.

(11) The absence of a theory of indicia and indexes is particularly remarkable as the former play an important role between the Es and the Ich, the latter between the Ich and the UberIch.

The master seems to have been consistently aware of many of these things, as we can see from the (voluntary) unpublished works at the time, recently published by Ilse Grubrich-Simitis, but also as we can already see in the published text of Beyond the Pleasure Principle, where Freud writes: “We must expect to receive the most surprising answers from biology. They may be answers such as to bring down the whole artificial edifice of our assumptions.”

The last sentence of Wittgenstein's Conversations on Freud (between 1942 and 1946) is worth citing: "analysis is likely to do harm. Because although one may discover in the course of it various things about oneself, one must have a very strong and keen and persistent criticism in order to recognize and see through the mythology that is offered or imposed on one. There is an inducement to say, 'Yes, of course, it must be like that'. A powerful mythology.". There is no better invitation to carefully differentiate between the session (possibly effective and saying something) and the analysis (largely mythological). Wittgenstein, who sees himself as a sympathizer and almost a disciple, was already heading in the same direction in his 1938 Lectures on aethetics: “If you are led by psycho-analysis to say that really you thought so and so or that your motive was so and so, this is not a matter of discovery, but of persuasion. Of course, if psycho-analysis cures your stammer, it cures it, and that is an achievement.”

Not content with highlighting the ways in which psychoanalysis continues WORLD 2, an anthropogeny must also note the extent to which, in the second half of the 20th century, it delayed WORLD 3 through its diversions of attention. It obscured the nature of dreams and sleep; the fruitfulness of the awakening as a source of intelligence and genius; the perceptive and logical field effects; the originality of art; presence-absence; music, etc. The anthropogenic obscurantism nurtured by the concept of sublimation (Sublimierung), or the unique male libido (Penisneid), or the supposedly universal Oedipus complex, or the almost always significant slip of the tongue, cannot be overstated. And especially sexual repression, which obscures Homo's two essential repressions, i.e., those of his technical being and of his semiotic being, particularly in the might of power and indexations.

24B4b. Complements

The additional contributions to the psychoanalytical edifice in the first half of the 20th century do not really deviate from this line, but instead, they complete the system. (1) Freud’s figure of the mother was poorly elaborated, and instigated in Melanie Klein the description and consideration of the traumatic maternal image. (2) In the wake of the Penisneid, the female libido, the “dark continent of psychoanalysis”, was first identified as an inverted male libido expressed in the castration-rape-birth trilogy of Hélène Deutsch. It was not until 1974 that, in Speculum, Luce Irigaray, thematizing the topology of the female organs, recognized the support of another libido, and therefore of another being, in a break with the western tradition of closed totalizations, where the One, the Same, the End (telos) are secured by the penile erection, and in any case by the formative privilege that the male seed has had in reproduction, since Plato and Aristotle. (3) The oversight of the originality of cultures was partially redressed by Karen Horney, who by the same token privileged a phenomenon that she judged to be transcultural: anxiety; and above all by Erik Erikson, who had close ties with the Amerindians. (4) Freud had a tendency to reduce the generalized partition-conjunction to the sexual partition-conjunction, which was more alleged than described. One of his early great followers, Jung, thematized the opposite movement, regarding the sexual partition-conjunction as one of the realizations of the universal partition-conjunction, especially in mythological and symbolic archetypes; “was Freud's magical unconscious not less interesting than the transcendental subconscious?” (Whorf, 1941). Ferencsy’s Thalassa also fits into the universal partition-conjunction by fantasizing animal and hominian mating as a male return to the original female sea. (5) Wilhelm Reich wanted to address the physical aspects of sex, noting the originality of orgasm as a “melting sensation”. (6) Adler probably had the intuition that Freud had overlooked the fundamental repressions-unconscious of Homo, those which carry power and its indexations. However, he did not realize that they originate in technical distance and semiotic distancing, and massively deduced them from a “will to power” going back to Nietzsche and Schopenhauer.

24B4c. Trivializations

Major inventions are quickly socialized or trivialized. In envisaging the analyst as a licensed therapist having passed tests supervised by an institution, in limiting the session to a cure, in understanding this cure as the construction of a socializable ego (a “good ego”), in focusing it on anguish and frustration, some variants of psychoanalytical practice became part of the psychology of common sense or the dominant social model, particularly in the USA, where Freud nevertheless had flattered himself of bringing “the plague” when he landed.

24B4d. Secular and biblical reforms

Worried by its trivializations, as well as by an internal critique, psychoanalysis also experienced some reforms. This is an opportunity for an anthropogeny to focus on reform itself, as a major anthropogenic practice. It presupposes the prerequisite of a clear-cut system, and can be found in full force in the indefinitely subarticulating approach of the Hindu schools <13L1, 28B1>, and throughout the rational West in successive churches – for example, Lutheran and Calvinist – or in religious orders – such as the Cluniac, Cistercian, Trappist versions of the Benedictine rule. Some people would even like to understand Buddha and the emperor Azoka (-250), who adapted his doctrine to the people, as “reformers” in Hinduism, having inspired Jesus of Nazareth, as a “reformer” in Hebraism. The East was in widespread exchanges at the time, and Hebraism was worked on by the Essene movement. Having established itself as an initiatory religion, and even as a dogmatic church of the western type, with a declared unique founder (“Freud is the only one”, Lacan said) and with accredited practitioners (according to a didactic or a pass), psychoanalysis was bound to undergo the more or less sectarian phenomenon of reform. The latter found its paroxysmal realization in France – a dogmatic, Calvinist and chronically Hebraic country – through Lacan’s secular displacement of Freud and Marie Balmary’s biblical displacement.

A secular reformation of Freud. Lacan

To bring together the main Lacanian shifts will be useful for anthropogeny, to shed light both on a reform that owes much to the era, and on the psychoanalysis it affects. (a) Like in language according to Saussure, reality [in Lacan] becomes a simple Referent of the Signifier/Signified couple, whereas “Realität” is still the “Kriterium der korrekten Handlung” for Freud, who strongly declares that the loss of sentiment of Reality, both technical and social, is the unmistakable criterion of psychosis (b) Like with Ionesco – the comic author of the 1950s – in the Signifier/Signified pairing, the Signified is in turn thrown out of the game in favor of the sole Signifier conceived as “slippery”, of which the “subject” then etymologically becomes the sub-jectus, the thrown-under. Desire is the “concatenation of signifiers”, which cannot be interpreted, a mixture of brilliance and trauma as a result of being shattered. Did Merleau-Ponty not remark at the same time that language was spoken inside the speaker before it was spoken? (c) Again, as with Saussure (“in language there are only differences”), then with Jakobson, and finally with “my friend Lévi-Strauss”, structure is the only truth, but an non-significant one; Bataille had already written: “The truth that science pursues is only true on the condition of being devoid of meaning, and nothing has meaning unless it is fiction.” (d) As before with Wallon, the mirror plays a role in the constitution of the self; it accounts for its capture in the imaginary (thematized by Sartre) and for its only possible redemption by the symbolic (thematized by the English logicians), the symbolic of language, itself referring to writing. (e) The hole, which fascinated Sartre as a keyhole and a draining hole, and Marguerite Duras as “a word-hole, hollowed out at its center by a hole, a hole where other words would have been buried”, becomes the privileged figure of the subject's non-place. (f) Freud’s death impulses and Sade’s fascination, both revisited by Bataille, propose the “absolute object” of ethics: “thou shalt not yield on thy desire.” (g) In the mathematics of the era, non-representable geometric forms (Moebius’ ribbon, Klein’s bottle, Desargues’ projective plane) and knots propose the metaphorical Signifiers of the subject's “dis-being”, while algorithms reminiscent of Türing and Gödel enunciate “impossibles”, which thereby become the “mathemes” of a “phantasm-free real” capable of curing us of the “cumbersome real”. They are the supreme realizations of the “sublime phallus”. (h) Following the existentialist motto: “I am not what I am”, “I am what I am not”, the crossed-out S-subject, the subjugated-to-signifier, delocalizes the cogito: “I think where I am not, therefore I am where I do not think (...) I am not, where I am the toy of my thinking; I think about what I am, where I do not think about thinking.” (i) Heidegger is consulted for his “sovereign significance”, and Hegel via Kojève for his negativity. (j). Bell’s famous article about the magnification of gesture and language in classical tragedy undoubtedly inspired (popularized as it was by the Diogenes prize) the “brilliance of Antigone” as the light of the redefined psychoanalytic ethic (Seminar VII).

But if, unlike Freud the founder, Lacan the reformer does not introduce new concepts, and thinks more by reaction than by action, by disengagement and denial than by engagement and speech, he does endorse a new, or at least disconcerting, approach, and certainly a way, a style (“this way is the only formation (...) it is called a style”), which is already an event, or a revolution. In 1972, when the school was set up in Italy, the preliminary statement “Freud is the ONLY one” was immediately followed by “I don't give a damn about you Freud!” The “subject” – well defined as the “submissive-signifier” – is fundamentally discontinuous, and the session responds to the patient’s demand for “happiness” by shaking (vs. leading or inducing) him out of the unifying, dual or trinitarian illusions of the “imaginary”, at best to the “gift of what he does not have; that is, what is called his love.” Thus, the session may be short for reasons other than the analyst's financial greed. The “practice” is no longer a cure, and it is not for nothing that, in the transference, the patient is called analysant ou analysand, and that the psychoanalyst, who will not stop until he has shown the “fiction” he is playing, is simply called analyst. Because, more than psychoanalysis, it is now a question of mere analysis, with epistemological and (dis)ontological dimensions of enlightenment. Spanning half a century of work, the texts and words of the Writings and the Seminar do not record a single therapy – the Aimée of the “Aimée case” cured herself in a fortnight – in contrast to Freud's innumerable narratives of therapy; they are polemical, theoretical in the form of apophthegms, and never comprise any sustained demonstration, or even argument; only a style, which is authoritative. One may consider that all this introduces something of the discontinuity of WORLD 3. But it is with strong remanences of WORLD 2, given the declared ignorance of cosmology, biology, computer science, cerebral neurophysiology; given also the obsession with classical truth (ontological and substantialist) which one never tires of challenging, believing a little quickly that this is enough to overcome it. This favors magisterial flippancy and “discipliques” adhesions to the point of idolatry <25B5>.

However a significant unease stems from the fact that this view unfolds so strongly according to a primacy of signifiers over referents and even signifieds, and, among signifiers, a primacy of language over image, of symbolic language over phonosemic language, of writing over even symbolic language, of formalization (whose axiomatic character is erased) over writing, of paradoxes over common logic <20B>. There is also such a denial of tenderness, of the flesh (“décharner Eros”), of humor (vs. irony), of the smile (vs. laughter, at least virtual), of experience (“not amusing enough”), of the other (if not as a hysterical disciple, or hypostasis of the Other), of music as much as of sound as of the word, of the rhythm (which the slippage of signifiers excludes), that, from one moment to the next, Lacanian theory appears compulsive, restricted by a singular disposition, an idiosyncrasy that is precisely very explanatory of the period, which we will call the fixed-fixative-perception with logico-semiotic-defreezing. It will be opportune to return to this on the occasion of the diseases of Homo <26F2>.

A biblical reformation of Freud. Marie Balmary

Freud was Viennese and Jewish. He combined the Deutung – the interpretation inherent in the very sensitive verbal roots of the German language, whose etymological grasp was still sharpened in his time by the Gothic script <18E4>) – with the practice of Jewish glossators, tosafists or massorets. In a letter to Karl Abraham, he suspects that Jung understands him with such difficulty because “he is not of his race”. But since 1950 (Tresmontant S.J.), and especially from 1981 to 1995, i.e. during the “Mitterrand years”, hebraicity has enjoyed maximum political, economic, advertising, media and theoretical influence in France. Almost everyone was Hebraized, willingly or unwillingly. All the more so because the country had a tradition.

Centuries-old tradition in France. Seeing that he would not be able to understand the Hebrew of his Bible in his lifetime, in 1800 Fabre d’Olivet initiated the cultural linguistics of Whorf, who acknowledges this debt to him. Much more was the case of the most famous Jewish interpreter, Rashi (1050-1105), a winegrower from Troyes in the aftermath of the Year 1000 when Homo – then seeing himself as co-creator with the Creator - opened three centuries of Romanesque basilicas, Gothic cathedrals and theological sums <13J>. In the course of his instruction by the German exegetes of Mainz and Worms, the young Rashi – whose state of fortune did not allow him to linger in memorizing their traditionally oral lessons – had developed the habit of writing them down. This was at the time when the great Arab commentators were sweeping the West. His commentaries, which were continued by his children-in-law, enjoyed great success in Europe that was to be repeated two centuries later in the fifty volumes of the Franciscan exegesis of the complete Bible by Nicholas de Lyre (Normandy, 1265-1349), which appears to have influenced even Luther's translation, the basis of protestantism. It is therefore not surprising that the biblical reform of psychoanalysis flourished in France after the death of Sartre (1980), who was very intrigued at the end by the Judaism of his secretary, Benny Lévi (Le Nom de l’homme, 1984), and after the death of Lacan (1981), who took pleasure in chastising his disciples for their ignorance of the Scriptures. This was all the more so because, amongst the many other recent translations of the Bible, Shouraki had just compiled in one volume his Hebraizing translation of the Old and New Testaments (1986), four years before his equivalent translation of the Koran (1990), in one of the most important cultural events of the twentieth century, insofar as it contributed to laying bare the substance of the three “religions of the Book”.

So, according to Marie Balmary’s Forbidden Sacrifice (1986), in line with PMD (Multiple Personality Disease) psychotherapists, and in opposition to the families grouped in the FMSF (False Memory Syndrome Foundation), Freud was mistaken. His patients frequently attributed sexual assaults to their parents. By academic opportunity, says Jeffrey M. Masson, - who worked at the Freud Archives, in 1981-3 - Freud twisted their accounts, treated them as fantasies, and devised an Oedipus complex whereby the child is the seducer, the polymorphous pervert, who wants to kill his father and marry his mother. Freud should have taken seriously the suffering of the narrators, and understood it as a reaction sometimes to the hold (possession) and sometimes to the abandonment (neglect, permissiveness) of their parents, and see how each child, while benefiting from (“maternal”) protection and (“paternal”) provocation, has to “go out on their own”, through “ruptures” and “breaks”. Similarly, the man-woman couple has to part with reciprocal possessions, even if they invoke the pretext of complementarity. Finally, “God” – a totalitarian tyrant, has to become the “divine”, a word that stimulates the word, to the extent of its veil, its mystery.

It is this freshness of Calling and Covenant – instead of Submission – that the psychoanalyst Marie Balmary believes she can “hear” in her patients’ words and can “read” in her Bible in Hebrew. In this latter, her careful reading – for which she says she is indebted to Lacan – sees a “departure towards himself” of Abram-Abraham when he goes out to Canaan; a healing of Sarah(i)'s sterility when she ceases to be “possessed” as sister and wife, and becomes herself; a call to liberation in the gestures and logia of the Gospel of Jesus, of which Girard had also just made a non-sacrificial reading (Des choses cachées depuis le commencement du monde, 1978). Furthermore, here the Bible concurs with the Greek Oedipus, if one no longer accuses him – as Freud had done – of wanting to kill his father and marry his mother.

This sort of reform remains ahistorical and acultural, like psychoanalysis, be it Freudian or Lacanian. When the holy text shifts from “Sarahi” (my princess) to “Sarah” (simply princess or within a multitude), when Isaac is substituted by a ram for which his sacrificer father has a “vision”, Marie Balmary certainly does not hear the text of a founding epic of Israel <22B2>, where the passage from a primary empire – Sumerian or Egyptian – to small semi-nomadic tribal kingdoms grounded on divine and human contracts is played out, and this in the environment of the first contractual alphabetic writings <18C>. According to the structures of a simple myth of origin, she listens and hears the adventures of a Wife or Child in general (überhaupt).

Her understanding is all the freer in that it applies to Hebrew, a Semitic language with short and bare roots, with intense manious phonosemia <16B2b> due to its unwritten vocalization, lending itself to indefinite interpretations. One wonders, however, whether one can, as the analyst does, see in the initial yod of Ish a phallic sign, and in the final hé of Isha a uterine sign (“open below”), when both this yod and this hé are read in our square Hebrew script, which did not become established until shortly before our era, and is very different from the archaic Hebrew and Aramaic scripts in the context of which the biblical text was written, and at any rate conceived, several centuries earlier <18C, 22B2>. And what about the readings of Rashi’s commentaries performed in square Hebraic, although they were conceived and written in the Rashi cursive, whose constant ligatures may have invited him to hear, for example, “the engendered child” in the “for-to” of the “they shall be for/to one single flesh”?

In any event, Marie Balmary’s Forbidden Sacrifice (1986) is so firmly assembled that it helps everyone to explore the extent to which the biblical reform of psychoanalysis will have been the last outburst of the free-knowing-subject-I of WORLD 2 at its end <30D>, or an attempt to move beyond it towards the windowed-windowing universal I of WORLD 3 through the byway – albeit biased – of the Hebraic WORLD 1B. (A bit like Picasso, who, in the early 20th century, initiated an imagery of WORLD 3 with Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, which went back through an equally biased WORLD 1A).

24B4e. The schizanalytic break

The movement initiated by Deleuze’s L’Anti-Œdipe in 1972 is particularly interesting for anthropogeny in that it contrasts with previous trends in its relentless desire to catch a glimpse of WORLD 3, and even to cross into it. The Western ideal of the vertical and synthetic tree gives way to the model of the rhizome, which operates in all directions, mostly horizontally. The disjunction (or/or), which was exclusive throughout WORLD 2 since Parmenides, becomes inclusive, and functions within opening triggers, thus also differentiating itself from the Chinese inclusive negation (“wu”), characteristic of the closure of WORLD 1B. The aggregative synthesis becomes essential: And... And... And, which can make one think of the aminoïd formations <21G>. The “coherence” (herere, cum) gives way to the “consistency” (sistere, cum), and even to the “plane of consistency”, by a valorization of surfaces echoing their importance in the topological varieties of the moment. In addition, the admiration for the Anglo-Saxon syntax “determiner + determinate”, encourages the juxtaposition of heterogeneous qualifications, in contrast to the French syntax “determinate + determinant” <16C2>.

On this account, there are only “flows and cuts” in the Universe, and the only things that matter are the “intensities” (tendere, in, tend in). “Consistencies” are confirmed as they arise, and not in the realization of a prior program or destiny. Most importantly, desire no longer presupposes absence; it is, one might say, a forceful, machining desire. Psychoanalysis was “ignoble” because it took pleasure in lack, the “non-noble” par excellence. Cracks are not gaps. “The three misunderstandings about desire are to relate it (1) to lack or law, (2) to a natural or spontaneous reality, (3) to pleasure, or even – and most importantly – to celebration. Desire is always arranged, engineered.”

Consequently, the boundaries between insanity and normality become blurred, and all that matters is health. It is the “great health” sensed by Nietzsche, which can be defined as the state whereby – regardless of the obstacles – a system can continue to function, to “machine” in its environment. Everything is plural: everyone has genders, just as they have languages. Everything is multifunctional, and if an organ is defined by a function, then the desiring body is “a Body without Organs”, as Artaud put it.

In this situation and praxis, brains work in pools, in “consistency” too. The author readily shares his writings with others, both men (Félix Guattari) and women (Claire Parnet). Unlike Lacan, experience and experimentation seem irreplaceable here, and the utmost attention is devoted to the ambient psychosociology, and to the diversity of ethnicities and historical moments of a Homo Historia, beyond a Homo Natura. Therefore, the second part of Anti-Œdipius (1972) forcefully outlines a cultural anthropogeny in three stages: (1) The Savages, in societies without writing, are defined by territorializing “local codes”, which inscribe bodies and are inscribed by them. (2) The Barbarians, in societies with writing of the primary empires, are determined by “overcodes” dominating local codes; the territory is made into the body of the despot, and places the scribe and his reader under the umbrella of a paranoid power. (3) The Civilized, initially the inhabitants of the Greek City, are defined by the flows of money and goods, which are “decoding”. Furthermore, a fourth archetypal group is privileged, the Nomads, those of whom “there is no history”, and who, “following their line of flight”, “are like the noumenes or the unknowable of history.” Deterritorialized and deterritorializing, they traverse territories instead of owning or being them. Activating the “war machine” against the “state apparatus”, they are – both outside and inside – external to any State. For contemporary Homo, do they not represent the hope for salvation?

The Anthropogeny will be alert to the fact that Deleuze’s undertaking seems to have disappointed its author. The Entretiens with Claire Parnet reveal some of the causes of this. (a) The paranoiac outlook shared by Deleuze, Guattari, Foucault and Althusser is such that there is barely any other reference here than to escape from constraints, in a Danaid enterprise, since “there will always be a tension between the state apparatus, with its demand for self-preservation, and the war machine, in its endeavor to destroy the state, the subjects of the state, and even to destroy or dissolve itself along the line of escape.” As in Epicurus, friendship is the only consolation, but it carries the fear of having to constantly spy on the friend, lest he in turn become the thing to flee from, a territoriality (“let your friend be your best enemy”, Nietzsche had already said). (b) The topology of surfaces, of the plane of consistency, is fearful of all thickness and moves between the Charybdis of the devouring intensity of the “black hole”, dreaded by Guattari, and the Scylla of the emptiness of the “whiteboard”, dreaded by Deleuze. (c) The academic and worldly worship of quotation has the effect that, in order to open up a new world, one is burdened with the prestigious, but outdated, remnants of the previous world. The writers “we love” who “turn out so badly” are Kleist, Nietzsche, Woolf, Lawrence, Filtzgerald, Artaud, Kafka, etc, all more or less busy escaping the twilight of WORLD 2, rather than surveying WORLD 3. (d) Moral preaching, the compulsion of brilliant formulas, and vaticination eventually lead to the litanic writing of the Entretiens, in which a number of ready-to-use formulas, which can hardly be expanded upon, recur as a leitmotif: “line of flight”, “plan of consistency”, “state apparatus”, “war machine”, “deterritorialize”, “be the grass between the cobblestones”, etc. (e) The customary silence on cosmology and biology, both so dazzling since 1950, means that, in the context of the second half of the 20th century, any attempt to build a consistent philosophy is impossible. The amino acid model would have gone further than the rhizome model in understanding non-plasticist formations <21G>.

What Deleuze and his group understood best about WORLD 3 was the “heterogeneity of series” as a defining feature of the universe. It supports the positive desire as a machination, and underlies the term schizanalysis. The latter consists, not in finding the same pattern everywhere, like the Freudian Oedipus, but in perceiving precisely original encounters, each time instituting, desiring, machining new series. Indeed, Wolfsmann – the man with the wolf – did not see one wolf, as Freud believed, but several, a pack. In this respect, Deleuze is in harmony with the times, with the radical, event-driven evolutionism of the biology and cosmology of WORLD 3 <21G3>.

24B5. The Elementary Catastrophe movement

Topology is the most philosophical field of mathematics since Leibniz. The mathematician René Thom was awarded the Fields Medal – mathematics counterpart of the Nobel Prize – for realizing that equations of differential topology have singularities that allow the formalization of seven catastrophes (strepHeïn, turn, kata, upside down), which he called elementary: the fold, the cusp, the swallowtail, the butterfly, the three hyperbolic, elliptic, parabolic umbilic <21E2a>. This he felt introduced a new mode of explanation, not just prediction, in several realms (Prediction is Not Explanation, 1991, with a substantial Lexicon by Alain Chenciner). This approach has extended so far into the field of human sciences that we must revisit it here.

In the field of geology, there was the so-called Riemann-Hugoniot catastrophe, which invited the mathematization of anticlines and synclines right down to their faults, and thus the interpretation of landscapes as basins of attraction defined by multiple attractors, among which, undoubtedly, plate tectonics. In biology, and in particular in embryology, the same view invited us to think, in line with D’Arcy Thompson's On Growth and Form, that the anatomical-physiologies of zoology are, to some extent, variations of differential topologies on a few basic schemes or equations. This starts with the fold, the first catastrophe that allows an organism to envelop, enclose and absorb another element, in predation. This led to a psychology where all perception appeared as an efficient assembly in the service of the tactics and strategies of predation; hence Harry Blum's theory on the recognition of forms. Linguistics itself was affected, if it is true that the structure “subject + verb + complement” is a shortened realization of the catastrophe of the predation lace: “The cat takes the mouse”, “The mouse is taken by the cat” <17B3>. Finally pointing to an esthetic. In the passages from one form to another, from one basin of attraction to another, differential topology demonstrates – immediately before and immediately after – states in which very multiple attractors become compatible for an instant in complexities that defy calculation. Let's talk about “excited states”. Works of art would be remarkable productions where such states are overexcited and captured (predation always). And this applies to painting, sculpture, architecture, music, poetry, dance, that “semiurgy”.

At the 1974 World Congress of Mathematicians in Montreal, C. Zeeman created a sensation by introducing this approach into systems theory, which was very much in vogue at the time, and by invoking the input-output correspondence of a black box where the characteristic of the space-time produced becomes the stable variety of a potential. Thus, models of stock market crashes, revolutionary riots, etc. were proposed. This insight was publicized in the media under the name of “catastrophe theory”.

For an anthropogeny, René Thom, the initiator and inspirer of the “catastrophe theory” movement whose name he regrets, was an example of what Pascal called the esprit de justesse [spirit of rightness], “where the consequences of few principles are well drawn, and it is a righteousness of sense”, which is not the spirit of geometry, i.e. “to understand a great number of principles without confusing them”, and even less the spirit of finesse, where “the principles are so loose and in such great number that it is almost impossible that none of them escapes”. This rightness will have had some puzzling consequences. (a) The mistrust of the experimental method, and particularly of molecular biology; it is not here that one would find a reflection on amino formations and their “aminoid” resonances. (b) The postulation of a philosophia perennis, that of Plato for the mathematical concepts supposedly a priori <19D7,19F3>, and that of Aristotle’s Generation of Animals & History of Animals for the embryological views, whose translation first occupied d’Arcy Thompson, and whose merits Thom himself explored in Semiophysics. (c) A belief in mere intuition, particularly in mathematics, leading to the rejection of “modern mathematics” as a teaching tool until adolescence.

But, despite these oddities, the simple fact of Thom’s existence as a true philosopher remains a warning in itself. One might have thought that philosophy would die with the WORLD 2. Didn't Hegel give the last system, and Sartre the last question (that of the being of consciousness)? Especially since the so-called ‘philosophies of science’ barely go further than local and incidental remarks, and since we have become used to calling moralists or trivial essayists “philosophers’. Only Wittgenstein’s and Whorf’s philosophies of language – thanks to their sensitivity to the effects of presence, more than of consciousness – announce a new lease of life. Also, by virtue of a certain radicality in their formulation and their interests, Thom’s texts remain at the philosophical (or metaphysical, epistemological, ontological) level, and they often herald the WORLD 3, although they sometimes unduly sacrifice themselves to the spirits of Plato and Aristotle. The table in Structural Stability and Morphogenesis (Benjamin, 1972, pp. 332-3) wherein the seven elementary catastrophes confront their “names of singularity”, their “organizing centers”, their “universal deployments”, their “remarkable sections”, their “spatial interpretations”, their “temporal interpretations” (“destructive sense” and “constructive sense”) complements Kant's category table to good effect.

This ontology-epistemology governed by the fold concurs with an ethics of involvement (plicare, in) of Universe <29D4, 30L>. It is an ethic of everyday conduct, but also of scientific research: “All the great theoretical advances stem from the ability of inventors to put themselves within things, to be able to empathically identify with any entity in the external world.” In this view, metaphor is a pathway to science, not a mere figure of speech. The anthropologist Lévi-Strauss was not merely being polite when he forced himself to eat the large white worms enjoyed by the tribes he studied. Or Seymour Benzer, the precursor of germanium transistors, who ate and made members of his laboratory (and his family) eat the flies whose genetic and mutational conditioning of behavior he studied .

24C. Anthropologies

Having to address the theories that Homo produced, we started with his theories about things <21> before his theories about himself <22-24>; and, from among the latter, we now turn to anthropology, i.e., the discourse that takes hominian nature as its frontal object. The history of the word (antHropos, logia) already indicates the extent to which Homo is reluctant to accept himself as the object of his study. Originally, in French, anthropologie only referred to a discourse held in human terms, for example Malebranche’s human discourse on God. And, when the term began to mean discourse on man, it was aimed at a supposedly known human essence, the essential implications of which Kant’s three Anthropologies (theoretical, practical, moral) envisaged, and whose geographical and historical differences were observed in English ethnology. It was not until around 1900 that anthropology became the pursuit of what Homo is, venturing to ask the question whether he even has an essence.

24C1. Philosophical anthropology

It is not that philosophers ignored the subject of Homo, but they addressed it for centuries as a consequence of their theory of things. The balance of yin and yang in China. Parmenides’ reflection of the Strict One. General Flow in Heraclitus. One of the four elements’ combinations in Empedocles. Genus and species among genera and species for Aristotle. Echelon on the scale of processions-recessions for Plotinus and Neoplatonism. (Eminent) degree of participations in Being for Thomas Aquinas. The intersection of extent-movement and thought in Descartes, then Spinoza. The (privileged) monad in Leibniz. Interface of the in-itself and the for-itself in Kant. Hegel’s stage of the great Logic by which Substance returns to itself in Consciousness.

Kant was therefore not exaggerating when he claimed to be carrying out a Copernican revolution by demanding that, prior to any conclusion about things, hominian specimens should ask themselves about their capacity to know something in general. But he himself remains at the “conditions of possibility of objects as objects”, according to his three archetypes: Euclidean geometry, Newtonian physics, Reimarus' biology. And his anthropology remains ancillary, as its title states: Anthropologie in pragmatischer Hinsicht (1798). In short, only Kierkegaard and Nietzsche undertook to go straight to human beings. And isn’t it the reason why neither men appears in Bertrand Russell’s A History of Western Philosophy? Even the highly existentialist Heidegger, when deciphering the being-there, the “Dasein” (Homo) as an Origin, locates this origin in the “guigantomakHia peri tès ousias” of the West. And in 1950, Sartre still constructed his individuals (Baudelaire, Genet, Flaubert) with the relations of a transcendental In-itself and a transcendental For-itself. And his groups: Jews, anti-Semites.

Among anthropologist philosophers, we shall make a special place for Spengler, who, during the last surges of WORLD 2, presented a philosophy of history that was not simply a general dialectic incarnate – as with Bossuet, Vico, Hegel, Comte – but uncovered Homo’s radical historicity by following and characterizing his successive epistemological bases, namely the civilizations. The two mighty volumes of Der Untergang des Abendlandes (1918, 1922) demonstrated his infallible perception of WORLD 2, and even of the scriptural WORLD 1B, while Der Mensch und die Technik – a short essay by the political commentator he never succeeded to be – proves his radical incomprehension of technology, science and the prodromes of WORLD 3. But a truly historical reading was initiated, which was carried on by Toynbee, Foucault, Deleuze.

24C2. Cultural anthropology

The 1900s, which marked the beginning of a crisis of foundations in mathematics, logic and physical theory, also marked the beginning of cultural anthropology. We have seen this heralded by means of differential history in Herodotus, Marco-Polo, De Landa <22B6a>; to this we can add Montaigne’s Apology for Raimond Sebond. But it only gained strength under the effect of Darwinism, when Herbert Spencer suggested seeing Homo as an orthogenesis going from the homogeneous to the heterogeneous, and particularly when James Frazer, in his monumental The Golden Bough (1890-1915), tried to demonstrate the way in which the magic of origins had “progressed”, had “improved”, had been progressively “purified” into religion.

Cultural anthropology fully took shape around 1915, i.e., slightly later than the epistemological crisis of the foundations, when Malinowski, immersed in the tribes of Melanesia, openly announced WORLD 3 by declaring that he was a “participant observer”, first through an interpreter, then in pidgin, finally in Melanesian. He no longer makes a distinction between primary and secondary domains: in the Trobriand Islands, he observes myths, law, sexuality (this is the age of Freud and Havelock Ellis). Rather, he makes a distinction between theoretical custom and practical custom, each with its own sphere of influence. In his eyes, everything must be verified at the level of everyday life. Is this why he privileged magic, perhaps too much so? Attentive to the social functions of what he observed – we will speak of functionalism – his approach was relatively synchronic, breaking with the 19th century evolutionism.

The fundamental questioning of Homo thereby engaged was clarified in the 1930s, when – as we have seen – Whorf discovered that the Hopi had a language and thought that differed significantly from the Standard Average European (S.A.E.) whenever it was not a matter of the space-time of the technique. Leenhardt reached similar conclusions, first in South Africa and then among the Canak people of New Caledonia <23D4>. The extent to which this discovery was disturbing can still be appreciated today by the fact that Language, Thought and Culture – by the former – and Do Kamo – by the latter – remain the most difficult books one can read. They are much more challenging than the works of the most vertiginous Western philosophers (or of non-Western philosophers translated by Westerners), because they demand precisely that each one should question the most intimate structures, textures, and growths of his or her own thought.

It was partly because of this difficulty that translational linguistics <23D3> and structuralist cultural anthropology <24B2> placed the epistemological and ontological specificities of hominid groups in brackets, to the benefit of a generalized exchangeism, governed mainly by compensatory circulations, since 1950 <23D3>. This makes us all the more attentive to the reaction marked in 1977 by Pierre Clastres’ Archéologie de la violence (Libre 1), which aimed to herald an anthropology less distant from the WORLD 3 through a sequence of propositions: (a) the wild group (hunter, gatherer, even cultivator, breeder) practices the exclusivity of the territory and non-accumulative, non-commercial, undivided autarky (no division of labor, except that which divides the sexes); (b) this in-group, which rejects all unity by domination, all State (the chief only expresses the law of indivision fixed by the Ancestors) can only be confirmed by the mirror of an out-group; (c) the Other is therefore either friend or foe in complementary ways; (d) war thus has the function of confirming the enemy as a mirror of the friend; (e) war calls for the fragmentation and also the alliance, both mobile; (f) the sphere of the alliance determines the sphere of the extra-group exchange; (g) the exchange of goods culminates in the exchange of women with respect to the ally, vs. the abduction of women, which is par excellence the goal of war with respect to the enemy; (h) “the primitive social being thus simultaneously needs exchange and war, in order to combine both the autonomist point of honor and the refusal of division”. In short, in the savage group, war prevents the state, while Hobbes' thesis for our nations is the opposite: the state prevents war, which destabilizes the state.

According to Clastres, this negated three understandings of savage societies and war: (a) the naturalistic interpretation, by Leroi-Gourhan, which considers war to be a natural continuation of hunting and capture, not a structure that establishes society and the socius. (b) The economist approach, which sees war as a way of obtaining essential goods, such as protein for South American Indians (Gross and Harris). On the contrary, savage societies, which are self-sufficient and non-accumulative, are “leisure societies” (Lizot). (c) The exchangeist reading, by Lévi-Strauss, who considers war as a modality of exchanges when they fail. “Exchanges are peacefully resolved wars, wars are the outcome of unhappy transactions.” (The Elementary Structures of Kinship, 1949).

The archaeology of violence of french anthropologist Clastres is apparently grounded in the claims of ancient travelers affirming that “primitive peoples are passionately addicted to war”. With their ever-increasing focus on “war machines” as a parade against the “apparatuses of the state”, Deleuze and Guattari acknowledged their debt to this reading, which, on the subject of “savages” <24B3e>, sheds some light on the foundations of Homo in general. It was, if anything, a further confirmation of the function of the out-group (enemy) to support the in-group (we-group) <3F>, which has been recognized by cultural anthropology since at least 1910.

24C3. Physical anthropology

When, in 1986, the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique de France [CNRS] published a book by some thirty specialists from various countries entitled L’homme, son évolution, sa diversité – Manuel d’anthropologie physique (HED), the preface reads “In 1885, Paul Topinard published his treatise on physical anthropology. Since that date , no book reviewing the state of knowledge in this field has been printed in French.” One cannot better exemplify Homo’s fear of seeing clearly into himself as a reality of genus and species.

After all, Andans and Fuegians have singular respiratory systems and even metabolisms. The vulvar lips of Hottentot women are exceptionally wide. Such physical peculiarities not only affect restricted populations, as in these two examples, but sometimes determine what physical anthropology calls “subspecies” or “great races”, such as the foot of the melanoderms (blacks), which is very different from that of the leucoderms (whites) and flavoderms (yellows). Indeed, it does not have a plantar arch, although it is not a flat foot, which has certain repercussions for the relationship with the ground and therefore for the exercise of stature. The word race indicates that there are geographical, climatic, sanitary and also cultural actions that eventually select organisms to the point of making them – after a few centuries or a few millennia – physically very different from one population to another. Today’s study of past and present DNA confirms this throughout the planet. And also confirm that these Homo’s biological specifications do not prevent reproductive crossbreeding, cultural exchanges or thematic conflicts, and are thus, through their variety and tension, an essential mainspring of Homo’s history.

In future years, Europe will constitute a remarkable field of study for observing racial factors, i.e., natural variations-selections with cultural consequences, and correlatively cultural variations-selections with natural consequences, if it is true that the European woman has about 1.5 children, and that the population of the subcontinent will therefore have to renew itself by immigration for about a quarter every twenty-five years if it wants to maintain itself, if only for economic reasons.

24C4. Paleoanthropology

Although all the preceding theories are enlightening for an anthropogeny, they do not stand up to paleoanthropology, which has literally exploded since 1960 with regard to Homo as a genus and a species. The results are astounding. They have the advantage of being expressed briefly. They shake everyone to their roots. They are suitable for the media, illustrated journalism, radio and television, which are even useful scientific instruments in this respect. Indeed, it occasionally happens that a specialist finds in a medium-length television program the opportunity to circulate a thesis that is still too risky to be accommodated by traditional scientific publications, and which is nonetheless fertile, and perhaps decisive.

An anthropogeny cannot emphasize enough just how recent this ideological earthquake really is. Although the first Neanderthal was discovered near Düsseldorf in 1856, and the Aurignacian culture has been excavated since 1860, Dart’s leading article, The Man-Ape of South Africa, was published in 1925 and remained confidential. Moreover, although Richard and Mary Leakey discovered the Olduvai industry in Tanzania in 1931, they had to wait until 1954 to find two teeth, the first osseous evidence of the presence of Australopithecines in East Africa. In 1959, they found an almost complete Australopithecine skull in the same region. Since then, however, there have been numerous upsetting discoveries, year after year, and everywhere. New techniques of investigation have followed: carbon 14, potassium/argon ratio, thermoluminescence, learned and artistic anatomical reconstructions, understanding of biotopes (palynology), comparative exploration of DNA (mitochondrial) between the stages of Homo, or between Homo and cousin species.

Nothing indicates the transition from WORLD 2 to WORLD 3 better. Until 1960, Homo, who had long been endotropic in his theories, had some justification for considering that he was a species defined by an essence, the reason, which had only had its fortunes and misfortunes, with developments and regressions. Today, homo can no longer ignore the fact that he groups populations with techno-semiotic characteristics that are globally very different from those of the animal world, but that obey the laws of the event-driven and multifactorial Evolution of the living in general <21E2e>, thus involving beginnings, ramifications, cousinships, dead-ends, erasures, and seriations that are not only multiple but heterogeneous, with synchronicities witnessing diachronicities in provisional compatibilizations. And all of this in the course of unpredictable biological, technical, semiotic and environmental mutations, the most important of which – such as those of the tectonic plates – are not always noticeable.

Following this, some people continue to see the human adventure as a global ascent towards complexity, consciousness and freedom, grasped as being the sense or Meaning of Evolution <21E5>. But as new discoveries and reconstructions unfold, another interpretation is gaining strength, one which for the French public is conveniently represented by Pascal Picq, Les origines de l’homme, Taillandier, 1999. It is that humanity and hominization in the common sense is not the brilliant result of a linear, orthogenetic process, but rather one result – among others – of the evolutionary adventures of populations of hominoids (super-family), hominids (family) and hominins (sub-family). And this has been the case since 7MA, the supposed era of the common ancestor of Homo and the current chimpanzees; and particularly since 3.5 MA, with the appearance of Australopithecus anamensis, afarensis, africanus; since 2.5 MA, with Homo habilis; since 1.5 MA, with Homo erectus and ergaster; since 500 thY, with Homo neandertalensis in Europe; since 100 thY or more, with Homo sapiens sapiens in the Near East. All these families, genera, species and races sometimes separate, sometimes crossbreed, sometimes borrow from one another, and sometimes perhaps eliminate each other brutally or through cultural disqualification.

And that does not necessarily require that sustained bipedalism, manual dexterity, cerebral orchestration, and both globalizing and punctual grasp of the environment necessarily go hand in hand. Rather, such and such a “prehominian” group may have been at one time a better biped although less differentiated cerebrally or manually, or the opposite, as climates and places dictate. Among these populations, if Noah's ark (monogenist or “out of Africa”) or candelabra (polygenist) models are locally and temporarily relevant, they never long do without reticular (immigratory) models, where biological, technical, and semiotic series intersect. Or bifurcate functionally. To the extent that the term hominization itself conceals a vague concept. In the space of a few decades, Homo will have been much more off-centered from the Cosmos-Mundus and implicated in the Universe by his paleoanthropology than by his physics <21E1> and archimedian biology <21E2> of the last hundred years.

24C5. The community of historians

For the knowledge that Homo gains of himself, we must still consider an ill-defined yet influential group, that of the common historians. In WORLD 2 in particular, Homo had known a few “great” historians, writers with singular ideas, whose views often pertained to a sort of prophetism about the past and sometimes foretold the future, such as Herodotus, Michelet, and Spengler. Since the end of the Second World War, however, a confederation of historians from all countries and social groups has emerged. They all share a modest, cross-bracing language, in which “in my opinion”, “it may well be that”, “I recognize that others think, not without reason, that...” abound. Confusingly but surely they know that hominin phenomena are at least as much about idiosyncrasies or complexions <26E1> as they are about structures and frank determinations.

These historians are rarely philosophers, or psychologists, or sociologists, or economists. They formulate judgments of common sense – as common as their history – in a kind of wisdom of nations under constant critical review. They agree that their elaborations are based on extensive research and a few discoveries, but also on problematic (re)constructions of what happened, where the “what happened” depends on their documentation, but also on their capacities of perception and memory, i.e. of this work of bioelectrochemical digestion <2A5> through which hominian brains (re)group, (re)clone, (re)generalize, (re)particularize, over the years, nebulae of events pointed out, circled, imagined, fantasized <7I>. For, at his side, the historian hears the biologist ask with perplexity: which groups led to modern sapiens sapiens? What were the factors of their survival? What is a determining factor? Vehicular history merely needs to follow on from biology: why communism? In what forms, where, when? Was there ever even a communism, and a liberalism, and a Christianity? Or has there ever been only one Christian, the one who died on the cross, as Nietzsche said?

Apart from the prevailing biological and anthropological climate, this community of common historians has been favored by several other developments. (A) The bluff of the “world-historical fellow” (in Kierkegaard’s cruel word about Hegel) is shaken by the speed and publicity of the updates emanating from speedy communication. (B) Psychologies and sociologies, which reduced everything to a few comfortable concepts, are themselves becoming aware of the idiosyncrasies and complexions of individuals and environments. (C) The overall vision of things has shifted from the stable order of the traditional Cosmos-World-Dharma-Tao-Quiq-Kamo to the Universe, seen as a sequence of only compatible variations or varieties, where “sense” does not fatally imply “Sense” <21E2e>, and where formations (Gestaltung) are growths (sometimes of ultrastructures) more than structures and textures <7F>. (D) As such, historical work, by overlapping, encounters past events as a succession of singularities, of Pascalian “Cleopatra’s nose”, while at the same time stabilities of tendencies (trends) can be gleaned from them, given the saliences and cleavages of neuronic representations <2A2>.

Thus practiced, common history has become a considerable anthropogenic factor. It spreads easily, as it is well suited to television shows, and above all to radio broadcasts. It fills the largest space in the most modern bookshops. Meanwhile, common history updates remain sufficiently episodic (a program is more quickly forgotten than a book) to avoid interfering too much with politics, which feeds on mythology, and specifically seeks to prohibit any revision of its founding myths. Moreover, the conviviality of the politician and the historian is facilitated by their moment of intervention – the former living in a state of emergency, the latter needing quite a bit of time (twenty, fifty years) – to access their archives. However, a review of common history acts imperturbably. In September 1999, Israeli schoolchildren opened their history textbooks and found a version of Israel’s occupation of Palestine that erased the myth of the “country without a people for a people without a country” that their parents had witnessed, and this on the instigation of a conservative government. Undaunted, the community of historians – in this case the “new Israeli historians” – eventually reframes the event, at least when its veracity becomes inconsequential to political designs, where force decides, or when its legend becomes so devastating that it harms more than it serves.

The anthropogeny will remark that popular consciousness manages to be dual without schizophrenia, since hominid brains are sufficiently divisible to practice both founding myths and the history that undermines or displaces them. This cleavage extends to the historian, who demonstrates the inaccuracy of myth while more or less continuing to practice it as a rhythmization of his own existence, according to the ethos of religious and political belief <27D3b, 28E2e>. It took almost a century for the French population to cast a revisionist eye on the Somme offensive of 1917. It will probably take another half-century for the “causes” of the bombing of Haiphong or the 'events' of the Six-Day War, though well detailed on French radio, to enter history books. People have never believed that it was profitable for them to establish their truth, be it the victory of the Milvian Bridge or the disaster of Alcaçar-Quivir. It took the achievement of the Archimedean mentality in the exact sciences to make a few to pursue this goal of truth – the common historians – and many to seek or exploit the illusion in their “duties of memory”.

24D. Anthropogeny

Let us recall that anthropogeny refers here to the constitution of Homo as a state-moment of the universe, and to the discipline that takes this constitution as its theme. It is in the latter capacity that we must now say a word about it again, even if it is elaborated upon throughout this volume.

24D1. The principal anthropogenic tasks. Collection of operators

After these four chapters on Homo theorist - and especially the last three on Homo’s theories of himself – it is worth reiterating the points that have been forgotten or left out by the received anthropologies. These points are mainly: the virtualities of a transversalizing, orthogonalizing, lateralizing organism; the very endotropic brain that accompanies it; the pairing of indicium and indexes privileged on this occasion; possibilization, as the most general hominian character; the thematization of perceptive-motor and logico-semiotic field effects; the primary universal distinction between functionings/presence (vs. consciousness/world); the complementary statuses of images (more fragmented) and music (more obligatory); language understood as the specification (not the representation) of a techno-semiotic environment, and first and foremost understood as a specification by a manious phonosemia; the “logical” sequence of three “WORLDS”: continuous-close, continuous-distant, discontinuous. And this revolves around a few initial factors: the walking step as cadence, and as physical and logical position and negation; the distribution of the environment in things-performances-in-situation-in-the-circumstance-on-a-horizon; the trait-point, as the beginning of writing and mathematics; the eight properties of rhythm. And so on.

The mission of an anthropogeny is probably also to identify the operators of the hominian adventure in general, i.e., those words, images, sounds, concepts, technical instruments, individuals, monuments and institutions that – visibly or covertly – provide the keys to entire epochs and stable and important groups. So, we have detached, along the way, the salient and pregnant operators that were Buddhism and Christianity, the scroll book and the codex book, the microphone and the CD-ROM, rationalism and empiricism, differential equations, the Battle of Salamis and the Shoah, Augustus and Tamerlane, the cross and the crescent, the Great African Rift and the Japanese volcanic insularity, the Hubble telescope, Gödel's theorem and Turing's machine, Indian ink and the bic pen, the drum and the violin, the gold bar and the banknote, etc. Given that the technical means of production (and distribution) <18L>, at times even more so than semiotic systems, have been, along with some emergent idiosyncrasies, the powerful, although unacknowledged, drivers of Homo's very event-driven <21E2e> evolution.

24D2. Definitions of Homo

At least since the writing of the primary empires, Homo has practiced the task of finding definitions of himself. This was one of the major tasks of the founding epics, and then of the philosophies. As early as the Akkadian Supersage, circa 1750 BC, Hominian specimens perceived themselves, in opposition to gods of alterable health but immortal, as compounds of clay, perishable, and wet blow, wè, more or less surviving death. In contrast also with immortal but this time unalterable gods, the archaic Greeks referred to themselves as brotoï, mortals (*mbrotos, *mrotos, mortuus), before Aristotle envisaged himself as a political animal, zoon politikon, and then the Latins as reasonable animals. Could an anthropogeny contribute anything in this respect?

Recent paleoanthropology probably advises against substantialist definitions by genus and species, since it tells us that, since the elimination of the Neanderthals, approximately 30 thousand years ago, sapiens sapiens has become a species that exhausts its genus, Homo. Furthermore, for the same discipline, Homo seems to be elusive, shaken by: its “robust” and “gracile” forms, its australopithecine and paranthropic cousins, its habilis and platyops variants, and recently by the discovery of very ancient primates, dating back to 6MY, such as Ororin tugenensis, which almost possess our femur, although diverging in the rest. Thus, a valid definition will not be so much in extension as in comprehension, combining a set of coherent characteristics, which are precisely distinctive to the extent of their coherence, and in which we can see that some primate populations participate to a greater or lesser extent, until they sufficiently form a family, a genus or a zoological species that is fairly well-defined, since 1MY, or 2MY, or 3MY.

And one can then try to specify whether, among these coherent characters, there might not be some that are more consecutive or more initial, which would enable us, by retaining the initial characters, to provide a definition that is both enlightening and short. We would for instance go through Anthropogeny backwards, looking to see if Homo is not sufficiently typed at the end of the first part, entitled the Bases. And in this one, if the first eight chapters are not already a sufficient base, or the first three, or even the first one. For example, wouldn’t transversality-orthogonality-laterality, by becoming more pronounced in certain primates, have been enough, after a few million years, to make the selection of Homo's globalizing senses and his endotropic brain plausible? Better still, would transversality not be the founding evolutionary miracle? In any case, to say that Homo is the transversalizing primate (ch. 1) is a relevant etiological definition. To say that he is the possibilizing primate (ch. 6) is a powerful operative definition. And relevance and power are the two things one asks most of a theory.

24D3. The chances for an anthropogeny to gain attention

In this vein, and still with respect to the ethos of Homo <25>, the question of whether an anthropogeny has any chance of being taken into account will be considered. Until today, everything seems to prove that hominid specimens – where they are not pressed by ruthless archimedean indexations, as in physics, chemistry, biology – do not expect verifiable and coordinable facts from their theories about things and about themselves, but rather reassuring cleavages, diffuse exaltations, themes that can be used for lively conversation or for the solitary enjoyment of an edifying reading, in any case to strengthen their organic and mental (techno-semiotic) consistency. That anthropogeny does not pass any value judgment, that it does not propose a program, that it only attempts to find out what has happened and what is happening, is therefore in no way mobilizing.

However, Homo autoconstructor, the controller of the atom and the genome, is facing such urgent demands from his current environment, and its paleoanthropology, biology, and history of civilizations are bringing him so much clarity and modesty about himself that we cannot exclude the possibility that he will no longer perceive himself as a being-in-the-world (in der Welt-sein), but as a state-moment of universe. Surely, this presupposes that the desire for Homo shall be born within him, rather than, for example, the desire for the Greek Anthropos, the Indian Pouroucha, the Chinese Rèn, the Polynesian Do Kamo, the Amerindian Dialoguing Engendered. Is this desirable? Let us just say that the generalized engineering of WORLD 3 calls for the desire for the Universe, beyond Cosmos-World-Dharma-Tao-Quiq-Kamo, and that the desire for the Universe, or desire of Universe <11C>, perhaps involves the desire for one of its most provocative state-moments, namely Homo.

But this is still very uncertain. A fundamental linguistics and anthropology of the Leenhardtian-Whorfian type, for example, would go a long way in this direction. It would enliven all forms of education, and would be a prerequisite for resolving the ethnic conflicts that arise from the exodus of populations induced by generalized engineering. This linguistics and anthropologies now have considerable means of documentation at their disposal, and they are highly valued in the places where they are being introduced. However, there is no indication that they are getting underway. The desire to see little or nothing in oneself – and thus to refuse any ongoing anthropogeny – seems to be deeply rooted in Homo, at least in his current state, in distant and effective phylogenetic constructs, as our next chapter on his ethos will confirm.

This is the opportunity to revisit the extraordinary event in anthropogeny – the Archimedean revolution, which began in 250 BC and, after a long pause, took hold around 1600. In physics, chemistry, and biology, this revolution forced Homo, day after day, to accept experience and replace vague concepts with more relevant formulations; mistakes were soon penalized by the failures or disasters that they implied. The same is not true in the human sciences. Here theories are very difficult, any statement requires infinite distinctions and sub-distinctions; verifications are elusive; specializations are impossible, as any domain can only be understood in the perspective of all others. And no catastrophe comes to sanction errors and approximations, except on the scale of centuries, and even then for a short time. There is no reason why the banal or the false – usually easy, flattering and fascinating – should not prevail over the truth, which is very difficult to access, nuanced, and does not lend itself well to rapid quotation, since the slightest truth requires tireless rigor: knowledge of customs, languages, scriptures, etc.

Ordinarily, it only takes a couple of hours for a knowledgeable person to explain to an uninformed interlocutor the essentials of such purely speculative or mythological views as Sartrean phenomenology, Freudian or Lacanian psychoanalysis, Kant’s system, the theses of vehicular psycho-sociology. On the other hand, it requires endless toil to find out what someone has really shown about perception, or language, or artistic grasp, or presence-absence, etc. So, just as good money drives out bad money in the so-called exact sciences, here bad money drives out good money, albeit when acknowledged for a while. With the privilege that the worldliness, indispensable to hominian societies <27G>, gives to the trivial and the extravagant.

SITUATION 24

The present chapter contains a peculiar difficulty. Anthropogeny is one of the objects to be covered. Hence, when characterizing other approaches – Archimedean psychosociologies, semiotics, structuralism, phenomenology, psychoanalysis, catastrophe theory, anthropologies – it does not refrain from establishing them in relation to itself, and from seeming assessing them. However the anthropogenic endeavor is not to evaluate theories, but to determine what their strengths and limitations can teach us about the theoretical capacities of Homo as a species, moving and evolving like any other species.