The French language often refers to la vie (life). For example, everyday life, contemplative life, religious life, artistic life, and political life. In the same sense, English speaks of Life, German of Leben, and ancient Greek of bios. Aristotle made a distinction between bios praktikos and bios tHeôrètikos. This is because Homo, throughout history and all around the globe, has structured his group and individual existences around spheres of activity, and also passivity, which are often so consistent as to give rise to specific characters or types: the warrior, the craftsman, the humorist, the gambler, the artist, the poet, the priest, the scholar, the mystic, the lawyer, etc.

This strong, stabilizing organization of existence into multiple lives is understandable under several headings. Because Homo is a system comprising an upstream as much as a downstream <11A>; because Homo is highly demultipliable according to nodes, envelopes, resonances, interfaces <11F>; because Homo is permeated by dehiscences and the threats of madness, which his ceaseless practice of tuning <25B7> does not completely overcome; because for Homo, illnesses are as rich as health <26E8>. What matters to an anthropogeny is not so much the description of the particularities of such spheres of activity-passivity – which is the realm of literary or scholarly phenomenologies – as the adequate observation of how they form a system where they complement and balance one another sufficiently for hominin specimens and groups to have persisted.

Under the somewhat overly generic title The Human Condition, Hannah Arendt targeted this system for WORLD 2. (a) Initially, Aristotle’s classification into three “lives” would have prevailed. (a1) The life of the PONOS, which was the concern of women, performed in a non-public place, the gynecae, and comprising duties of maintenance and reproduction, such as eating, sleeping, giving birth, and education. (a2) The life of the ERGON, which was a matter for craftsmen, and producing works <11I>, such as a house, a tool or utensil, a statue, or a painting, the duration of which often exceeded singular human existences. (a3) The life of the PRAXIS, which was truly value-instituting but risky, like Themistocles deciding to fight at Salamis, or Demosthenes offering to defend Olyntha against Philip of Macedonia. (b) Next, as the initiator of interiority, Rome would have already simplified this categorical system by introducing binary oppositions, one separating private and public life, the other separating otium (withdrawal from business) and neg-otium (negation of otium). From there, Christianity would have established its binary distinction between active and contemplative life. (c) Then, at the end of the West, Marx, in the postulation of initial unity, characteristic of the German Romantic movement, leveled the system by only retaining the notion of Arbeit (labor), understood as the activity-passivity constitutive of Homo in general according to the typically German relationship with die Erde, the Earth. (d) Lastly, in a last dilution of the system, the terms German Arbeit, English Labor (tedious activity), French Travail (tripalium, a machine made of three stakes securing an animal to shoe it) eventually encompassed all wage-earners indiscriminately: manual “workers”, intellectual “workers”, and so on.

But this overview, however interesting, will not suffice for our purposes. Confined to one civilization, i.e., Western civilization, it fails to recognize enough different lives. It does not reveal how multiple lives fit into each other to form a system. It does not explore how this system is fundamental for Homo. An anthropogeny must observe that lives – or spheres of activity and passivity – are essentially based on the seven or eight major ways in which Hominian dehiscences can be confronted: (a) at least partially filling/plugging them; (b) emigrating away from them; (c) flying over them; (d) overcoming them; (e) challenging them in a fencing game way; (f) surrendering to them in a fusional way. The following chapter will be made up of these six sections, and we shall add a seventh to consider the balancing act involved in social life.

27A. Filling/plugging dehiscences

The term “everyday life” says what it means. It refers to all those activities and passivities that “run their course”, “go about their business”, to ensure the constant and ordinary survival and reproduction of hominin groups and specimens, by filling/plugging their dehiscences and dispersions as and when they occur.

The most important aspects of everyday life are well known. They are private life, technical life, commercial life, consensual or political life. Here, commercial life, understood in the broad sense of exchange, plays a key role, as it encompasses absolutely everything - needs, interests, desires, contracts, and a portion of marital relations - and also because it upholds a certain minimum discipline in the group owing to the constraints inherent in the production and distribution of the goods it exchanges <6G3>. However, consensual life plays an equally fundamental role in groups of primates that are all the more quarrelsome because they have become techno-semiotic and presentive <8B9>, to the extent that it has swiftly become characterized as a “political life” with privileged times and places: the Polynesian men’s tent, the Greek Agora, the Roman Forum, and today’s parliaments and lobbies.

It is extremely important for the anthropogeny to understand that there are two sides to everyday life. (a) As being the treatment of Homo’s dehiscences by means of reiterated filling/plugging, it entails an effort and a difficulty that has sometimes led people to consider everyday life as the punishment for an original sin: “By the sweat of your brow thou shall eat bread.” Heidegger’s concern (die Sorge) as the foundation of reality (Realität) also follows this line. (b) But simultaneously, by virtue of hominian possibilization <6A>, everyday life encompasses a pleasure, a diffuse joy, a mobilization of the eight aspects of rhythm <1A5>, an opening of horizon, of desire, of Partition-Conjunction’s impulse <7H3>, etc. Schumann’s Le gai laboureur or Gounod’s Le chant des magnanières naively signal this. The songs accompanying work, those which mark the beginning of work and those signaling the return from labor in Africa and Asia substantially achieve it.

This being said, everyday life would not call for any further anthropogenic observations if it were not governed by the combination of War and Peace. In most societies, war and peace have formed a cycle. For instance, a social cycle in many archaic clans, where relations with neighboring groups – but also inside the group itself <24C2> – articulate through chronic, ritualized confrontations. Or a seasonal cycle in the early Middle Ages, where spring marked the return of rapine, while winter marked the resumption of forced tranquility. Or, a geopolitical cycle, since the formation of the great nations.

In the war/peace cycle, war is easier to define than peace, although it can take many forms: commercial warfare, political warfare, technical warfare, matrimonial warfare, epic warfare, and mystical warfare. Let’s start with war, as in Tolstoy’s title War and Peace. Of all of Homo’s publications on politics, Clausewitz’s On War (1830) is symptomatically the most widely read, with the lessons drawn from Napoleonic wars (“real war in its absolute perfection”) and the well-known phrase: “War is simply the continuation of political intercourse with the addition of other means.” From Lenin to Hitler. And right up to the 1968 E.U. article.

27A1. Everyday life as war

The anthropogenic functions of war do not always occur simultaneously, but they are sufficiently fundamental to be arranged in a panoply.

(a) Selection is an inherent part of the living world, where each species tends to fill its ecological niche. In non-human animality, selection is natural, with very restricted margins of adaptation. In the case of possibilizing Homo, selection has become primarily technical and semiotic, with considerable margins. Armed, technical, economic, and semiotic warfare act then as a possibilizing selection. It leads to ethnic redistributions and eliminations, of which the extinction of Native Americans since the 16th century due to the Spanish willing but also to the simple contrast between cultures and techniques has only recently been better documented.

(b) The identity of hominin groups, whose function is to preserve the forces of analogy within them, is tenuous because it is semiotic and aesthetic <23A>. Therefore, it is the subject of strict defenses, which evade discussion as much as possible. In the case of signed and signing animals, there can be no in-group (we-group) without opposition to an outgroup, which entails benign confrontations, but also deadly quarrels, whether settled or unlimited. At times seeking the death of specific others, at times of others in general, and at times of Otherness as such. Even at the cost of the death of one’s own.

(c) Macrodigitality exerts an attraction on Homo that is as powerful as <2B6> analogy, and the friend/enemy duo is its strongest case and the one most supported by the physiology of Homo’s mammalian brain and generalizing brain. The reality of war is a constant feature in the Old Testament and the Koran, and its metaphor at least still animates the Gospel: I have not come to bring peace, but war.

(d) The existential destiny-choice of a group (its topology, its cybernetics, its logico-semiotics, its presentivity<8H>) rapidly becomes sclerotic, just like all sign systems, and war is a strong and simple reanimation of it.

(e) Death is both an extreme and banal experience. War magnifies it to the dimensions of chance and necessity <15H1c,25B3>, in the fatum of victory and defeat, and sometimes in the apotheosis of the hero.

(f) More than peace, war is suited to the splendor of language, of epic, of tragedy <22B4>, of Dionysian exaltation, and even of lyricism, from the days of Gilgamesh and David’s Psalms. All scriptural societies since the primary empires have been crossed by salutes to the flag, processions of troops and war equipment, the rituals of command and military music with its vindictive or ferocious lyrics: “Let an impure blood water our furrows”. War is Homo’s favorite cinematic spectacle, and Guillaume Apollinaire famously sang of the exhilaration of bombing, even in the squalid trenches of 1914-1918.

(g) War has often provided Homo with the opportunity to employ his most advanced techniques. We all know the fascination that technology exerts through its feeling of domination and its ability to absorb the individual. Technical preoccupation, when it becomes intense, delivers us from any hesitation, as the American and Russian atomic bomb designers have learned.

(h) In war, the master’s paranoia and the disciple’s vicarious life find their full realization <25B5>. Hitler’s soldiers perceived themselves as completely vindicated, explained by the leader’s voice alone, or by the repetition of “Heil Hitler!”. Alexander’s soldiers functioned in the same way. Besides, it’s the whole population who is thus explained and justified through the actions of its fighters.

(i) There is the strictest relationship between weapons and indexing gestures, which are almost the essence of Homo <5G2>. Nothing better completes the indexical pointing as David’s stone-throwing and the Intifada. Or the barrel of the revolver, the rifle, or mortar.

(j) Murder, theft, and rape are nowhere so available. And it must be reiterated that they are the most radical negation of the other’s otherness, wherever it is perceived to be troublesome. Moreover, they have some connections with sacrifice and the sacred.

(k) The above is illustrated by the illnesses of ennui afflicting some veterans in the aftermath of major conflicts. Studs Terkel compiled several examples for World War II veterans under the suggestive title The Good War (1985).

Duels have a very special place in warfare. Because of the way dueling combines practically all the virtues of war. By transversalizing them. By giving them the conclusion of bilateral symmetry. By bringing the encounter to a climax (re-en-conter) <3>. Already in primary empires, two armies weary of battle would delegate their chiefs to represent them in a two-man fight, the outcome of which was worth an epic decision. This delegation of power illustrates that the Egyptian hymns, where the pharaoh is expected to adequately represent the totality of his people and where the people are merely the members of the pharaoh, express a very profound situation.

We should also give a significant place to delinquency (linquere, de) - that of outlaws, gangs, and mafias, with their trivial, inexpensive local wars - and which plays a regulating (compensatory, outlet) role in societies that, like our advanced industries, have experienced little or no general warfare.

27A2. Everyday life as peace

Peace is much more difficult to describe than war, particularly as it itself involves latent or internal wars. Even the legendary Pax Romana – which successfully succeeded in making the Mediterranean basin for several centuries a place where a single, envied form of citizenship, law, and economic, technical and political exchanges has reigned in a regulatory system known as peace – remained constantly militant. Consulates and triumphs were involved. When Pascal wrote that “peace is the supreme good”, the examples he provided indicated that he was concerned solely with preventing petty confrontations.

However, an anthropogeny may venture to define peace as that moment when a society exercises its own system independently from the urgent pressures of neighboring systems and is content with the animation provided by its own impulses and internal conflicts. But it will quickly add that peace thus understood only covered a few brief moments in the Roman, Christian, and rationalist West. Elsewhere, in Japan, the samurai and shoguns were the ideal of everyday life. India believed that Shiva’s destructive chariot traveled the Universe forever, and that the Shiva and Sakti couple were equivalent to that of Vishnu and Lakshmi. The Chinese concept of the yin and the yang considers conflict inherent in fundamental conversions (Yi). The West itself begins with Heraclitus’ “polemos patèr pantôn” – War is father of all and king of all – and with Empedocles’ animation of the elements by Hatred and Love, ending with Nietzsche’s “that your friend would be your best enemy.” The uninterrupted succession of brutal wars between the Greek cities of the founding era shows that these were not mere philosophical fantasies. There would have been no Greek sculpture, no Japanese grace, no Italian Renaissance without the military impulse of the societies that produced them.

Remarking on the absence of fighting and warriors in figurative representations of the European Neolithic, Marija Gimbutas concluded that there must have been a matriarchal society in Old Europe civilization some 8thY to 3thY ago, where war did not play an essential role. Discussion as to what is represented and not represented in the images of an era has afforded us an opportunity to say why this argument does not seem decisive <14D>.

There have been several attempts to ascertain which, war or peace, was more fertile for the development of Homo’s technology, consensus and economy. Clearly, wanderring warfare, like the Great Invasions between 400 and 1000, hindered practically all material, political and social progress, except for short and fragile periods in history, such as the reign of Charlemagne. Other than that, the rewards and losses of the “war and peace” cycle are so entangled that it’s impossible to follow the interactions. Advocates of the benefits of peace readily cite the peaceful European eighteenth century when manufacturing and the steam engine flourished. But considering the extraordinary technical and scientific boom between 1948 and 1952 that ensued the upheaval and acceleration of the Second World War, we must consider things differently. The difficulty is multiplied if we look at what is meant here by rewards and losses, progress and regression.

It remains for us to see that WORLD 3, in contrast to the others, regards peace as a normal state, and war as a passing aberration, a sort of physical and mental illness <26A-B>. This undoubtedly stems from the structures, textures and growths <7F> of generalized reticular engineering. A network is essentially connective, and the repair of its dehiscences merges with its developments. Furthermore, the pressing nature of ecological imbalances affects Homo auto constructor as a species to a sufficient extent to encourage him to resolve his intraspecific conflicts very quickly. Finally, techniques affecting the atom and the genome are so absorbing that they render national conflict derisory. Fighting, which was for the glory of populations for a long time, has now become a sign of their archaism. Developed countries no longer agree to any more than “police operations” (Kosovo), with the demand for “zero deaths”.

27B. Emigrating away from dehiscences

Since Homo is only able to fill/plug a part of his material or existential dehiscences through everyday life, war and peace, he has been led to use the availabilities and cleavages of in his neuronal synodies to build spatio-temporal other worlds enabling him to isolate himself for a limited time. These include games, entertainment, and hobbies.

27B1. Game. Role-play

Play comes from afar. Animals engage in a series of performances that have no other obvious vital purpose than to prepare them for essential adult activities, such as hunting, mating, protecting themselves, keeping watch, and building their habitat. But play might also stimulate some of these availabilities that, in mammals, would sometimes exceed the simple responses to stimuli-signals. It is not unreasonable to imagine a capacity for adaptation, a margin of adaptability exceeding the basic performances to which ethology is usually limited in the curves and counter-curves of two dogs pursuing each other. In such cases, the long-term selective advantage dissipates for the animal when it plays. To understand why the game is being played, we must therefore identify an immediate benefit. This is, without doubt, the pleasure associated with the perceptive and the motor activations-passivations whose output re-introduces input, and which are thereby self-perpetuating (Baldwin’s reactions). Similarly, from Mammals onwards, the pleasure of alternatively, albeit fleetingly, assuming the two complementary positions in the domination/submission relationship <6G4> is already observed.

Similar specific advantages and perceptive-motor pleasures can also be found in Homo sapiens sapiens, a primate that finds immediate pleasure in innocent chases and pugilistic brawls. But before long, in this possibilizing, signing and signed animal, the playing life expands to its technical and semiotic performances, and it goes from the simple throwing of a javelin to the provoking of vertigo, swearing in the face of death, daring immobility, flirting, or playing chess with multi-hit combinations. Children already play numerous logico-semiotic games when they first learn language and even enjoy toying with the presence/absence tension in the fort/da (far/here) of German, or the cou/cou of French, which has the added advantage of tapping into the echo effect. Even the usual clumsiness <3E> of hominin gesticulation has spawned the playful counter-clumsiness, i.e., sporting records.

Game has thus given itself increasingly more explicit, and even regulated, spatial and temporal limits, thereby setting it apart from the rest of the world (Huyzinga, Homo ludens): definition of a beginning and an end; layout of the field; thresholds to cross (pole vaulter’s bar); the crossing of lines (hopscotches); positioning of opponents; closed panoply of instruments and clothing; strict protocol of operations. All ways of actualizing hominin <1A> segmentarization, transversalization, and lateralization, while simultaneously protecting them from the non-adjustable emergencies and contingencies of everyday life. And once the “rules of the game” are in place, possibilizations proliferate depending on speed, patience, and complexities.

The ball has become the instrument of the hominin game par excellence, due to its spherical shape, its equal and adjustable availability in all directions, its rebounds (or echoes), and its indicial and indexing spurts, particularly when it comes to a pursuing mammalian brain to chase it to a goal. It lends itself to be shared and distributed by many at the same time, who themselves are echoing in a wider group, the public (populus), in a reciprocal exaltation. This fervor has spanned from the pelota of the Pre-Colombians, which was played by the living and the dead of the Popol Vuh, to today's cricket, basketball, and football.

In contrast with everyday life, games deprive themselves of rhythm and horizon, and therefore of excited field effects insofar as they lock themselves into their rules and are intended to be gratuitous in their performances. This is true of perceptive-motor field effects, but also of logico-semiotic field effects <7A-E> which, when they occur during certain logical games such as riddles and rebus, are immediately eradicated by the ensuing calls for obligatory sequences. When games truly maintain a rhythm, not just lively sequences, they become an art form. This is particularly true for this commedia dell’arte, which plays an essential role in children’s development. When left to their own devices, games as such tend to be combinatorial, which is precisely not what rhythm is and even denies its essence.

This is probably why, for Homo, games have always been a way of life that doesn’t have the same dignity as everyday life, art or religion. The uniqueness of Greek Olympiads is that the sporting competition was experienced as the discovery of the Greek Anthropos within the Greek Physis. Hence, these Olympiads were not mere side-effects of the dehiscences, like playing, but rather their heroic confrontation, evidenced by the choral lyricism of Pindar’s Olympics, a prelude to Greek tragedy <22B3end>.

In the same way, Maslow’s peak-experiences with athletes <8C> were not related to sport as a game, but to the climaxes of organic, para-orgasmic effort celebrated by Montherlant in his Olympics, in which he broaches the preparations for the competition instead than the event itself. In reality, the Greek Olympiads were not Olympic “games” as such, but a form of warfare, like hunting. In fact, Nazi film-maker Leni Riefenstahl understood these games better than Coubertin. In English, the term game oscillates between the game of the pursuers and the game being pursued and killed. The American Indian game of pelota, played with the dead and perhaps sometimes punishable by death, was not simply a game either.

An anthropogeny would greatly benefit from a systematic analysis of the relationships between civilizations and the games that have prevailed in each one, combining chance, necessity, and non-randomness in a particular way; or combining intellect, imagination, and combinatorial memory. In the Far East, Go is played without any particular direction or specification of pieces. European checkers are played without specifying the pieces, but with vectors. Chess is not particularly vectorial but has different pieces throughout the Indo-European era, from India to Europe. Football and cricket involve the application of rules with a considerable part of chance, which is officially ignored by players and spectators, who prefer to talk about lack of courage or skill to avoid having to contend with chance, which, conversely, is encountered in the casino’s gambling games. The Russians, who are often excellent at chess but have been unable to find stable and adaptable forms of government for a thousand years, are a case to be noted. Poe’s analyzes of chess, a game of memory, and checkers, a game of intelligence, are still fascinating.

Sometimes, everyday life is organized like a game. The first builders of the atomic bomb – and particularly the H-bomb – recalled their strange state of mind when, as young and absorbed scientists, they were protected from the consequences of their activity by both the local, closed, autarkic and thus playful organization of their research, and by the vertiginous nature of the elements they manipulated. Here, dialects provide us with some useful insights into anthropogeny, since English differentiates between game (having rules) and play (inventing one’s own rules); the German spielen refers to dancing; and the French jeu, associated with (enjoué and jeu) playfulness and stakes, comes from the Latin jocari, meaning to joke, to banter.

Finally, we should end with role-plays <6G4>, which are the most profound and richest of games, insofar as they interfere at all times with everyday life, both in power and in clientele <3E>. They were always the prevalent themes of everyday theater <26D4>, and, in contemporary societies where individualism has narrowed this theater, they subsist as a thematic exercise in mental therapy. There are no group dynamics sessions where they do not occupy several hours. They are sustained by Homo’s ability to switch from one role to another, master/servant, master/disciple, but also, when he plays one role, master or disciple, his ability to anticipate or continue the other role, endotropically <6G4>.

27B2. Pastimes

The term pastime is a bold one, much like killing time. It acknowledges that Homo, thanks to his wide-margin technical efficiency, has a surplus of time that sometimes burdens him, whereas for other animals the narrow-margin environmental pressure usually means that the volume of individual activity almost coincides with the survival of the species. Homo has leisure (leisure, licere, being on leave), which is generally unconscious, but sometimes perceived as such. These leisure activities annoy him enough (in French, ennui: inodiare, to hate), and sometimes terrify him by the metaphysical implications of their emptiness, to the point that he invented hobbies and pastimes.

These all involve very absorbing protocols on reduced panoply, such as crosswords, solitaire, or handiworks, which are all practiced for their long and seemingly regulated sequences. The English word to pass the time of day is nicely defined as to exchange greetings or engage in pleasant conversation. Almost everywhere, hominin societies have succeeded in combining sheer pastime with social obligations, which are highly effective in camouflaging emptiness. The Mediterranean game of pétanque is an obvious example of this: the chatter of players around two basic actions, “pointing” and “shooting” large balls around a smaller ball, the jack, with a prestigious guest, here the Chance of the uneven terrain.

27B3. Entertainment

Just like play, divertissement (entertainment, in French) protects itself from emergencies, but in a completely different way. It does not involve specific activities, but rather constitutes a way of approaching ordinary activities. It can be found in doing mathematics or going to church, just as much as in dancing, singing or playing. All it takes is that what you do gives you an opportunity to move away from seriousness and concern (Sorge), and gives place to pure, gratuitous possibilization and some kind of pleasure, in the form of rhythmization, field effects, and the opening up of horizons, which do not fall within the scope of games. Thus, entertainment is more intrusive and penetrating than play. Pascal particularly disliked it, because he was trying to draw Homo’s attention to his dehiscences and use them as a springboard for the supernatural. English entertainment has the same structure. Initially, it was simply a question of entertaining guests, and then of keeping them entertained by leading them in various directions. Entertainment is rhythmic, whereas games and pastimes are not. English sport involves varying degrees of play, fun, and entertainment.

27C. Flying over dehiscences: speculation

Our chapter on the theory of things and our three chapters on Homo theories <21-24> broached the attitude whereby Hominian specimens exploit their theoretical dispositions to face their existential dehiscences by creating a specific sphere of activity that we can call speculation, or speculative life.

The speculative life is divided into two nuances, one more active, the other dreamier, and well-illustrated by the contrast between Greece and Rome. In a decidedly Greek manner, Aristotle speaks of theoretical life (bios tHéôrètikos), where the ending “-ikos” indicates that tHeôria is a pursuit, somewhat like hunting. The more inward-looking Romans introduced the term contemplative life (templum) or meditative life (modus), which became popular in Christianity, where theory emerges within a certain floating attention, otium, denied by neg-otium <27Intro>. But, in both cases, speculative Homo tends to prioritize the endotropic circulations of his brain <2B>, situating himself – as the scholarly word speculation puts it – in a sort of spying (speculatio) from atop a flying observatory (specula), from where Homo conveniently arranges his whole environment around nodes, envelopes, resonances, interfaces <1A5h>, whose gravitation fuels a more or less autarkic system, sheltered from the turbulence of everyday life.

In such a way that speculative Homo, by constantly moving in a given that he has created, is able to preserve the multipliable system that he is in the enjoyment of a rhythm without jolts (“And like a good swimmer in rapture in the wave / You wing your way blithely through boundless space / With virile joy unspeakable.” Baudelaire). A strong metaphysics or a brilliant cosmology are also useful adjuncts to these practices of speculation. But Russian vodka – particularly in an izba in the middle of the steppe – often produced comparable results around midnight in winter. One might even think that the word intelligentsia comes straight from Russian for this reason.

27D. Overcoming dehiscences

Homo has used another stratagem to overcome his dehiscences, by skimming over them, surfing on them, using perceptive-motor or logico-semiotic field effects that are often excited <7DE>, with a goal of integration, explosion, solubilization and usually a combination of those three goals. Of all the lives that could be termed “surfing”, an anthropogeny will especially focus on art, love, political faith, and religious faith, which all communicate and support one another. They share the common trait of being powerfully rhythmic and horizon-expanding <1B3>. Moreover, they provide a prominent place for presentive functionings <8B9>, which is quite discreet in everyday and speculative life, and virtually non-existent in play, pastimes, and entertainment. We’ll close this section with the hateful life, which does indeed belong to this group while standing alone.

27D1. Artistic life

Artistic life is a behavior that evolves in the compatibilization of incoordinables and pursues this through the production of works (opera), those stanzas <11I> which, by coupling with Homo’s nervous system, trigger highly integrative perceptive-motor or logico-semiotic field effects, sometimes explosive-implosive or solvent.

Here the work is understood in its broadest sense, meaning that it can be a large tecture (a building) or a small one (a piece of furniture), an image, a word, a literary text, a piece of music, a dancing body, a garment, a piece of furniture, a utensil, an idea encased in a sentence or a word with an embracing manious phonosemia <16B2a>. Naturally, the compatibilizations pursued by art are of a rhythmic nature and invoke the horizon, since the horizon and the eight aspects of rhythm <1A5> are the only ones capable of reconciling incoordinable series, i.e., series that, without being incompatible, depend on attractors that are too divergent for their outcomes to be indexable along the same axes of coordinates, de facto, if not de jure<7G>.

However, there are two divergent functions of art, and thus of the artwork itself, as Anthropogeny has encountered several times in its chapters on the subjects of work <11J>, and very frontally about intense language subjects (“literature”) <17F5b>.

(a) Artistic life can aim to be primarily conforming, and in such cases, its overcoming of dehiscences results, at the end, in confirming ambient codes. This is the action-passion of an attractive piece of furniture or garment, a decorative painting, a pleasing sculpture, an agreeable and even graceful dance, or an undemanding novel. Occasionally, the work produced encapsulates the essence of a civilization, which is why The Blue Danube was featured in the program of the New Year’s concert broadcast throughout the West from the Musikverein in Vienna. Here, the rhythmic interstabilities (instabilities) are restricted and quickly lead to chords, like the resolving chords of a waltz or sonatina. The perceptive-motor or logico-semiotic incoordinations are there to act as stimulating transitory excitements, caressing and awakening senses and minds.

(b) But artistic life may also be extreme. This is the case when it overcomes dehiscences in a way that undermines or at least uncovers the ambient codes to their foundations, particularly the anthropological articulations underpinning a group in its environment. Extreme artistic life then creates the paradox of being both radically beatifying and fundamentally restless. It opens up under Reality to the hollowness of the Real and of the presence, absence, presence-absence <8E1>. That is what some language, plastic, musical, and choreographic artworks have shown us.

There are various degrees of artistic achievement. In conforming art – but mainly in extreme art – the work is all the stronger that the incoordinable attractors it compatibilizes are greater in number and more heterogeneous, and that their integrating, solubilizing or explosive-implosive compatibilization is more intense, more frequently retriggerable and more polymorphous. This is what made the “classics”. So, there are verifiable complexities that make Beethoven’s 29th sonata more “powerful” than some of his other sonatas or than a Schubert’s impromptus, even if one subjectively prefers Schubert. In this sense, Shakespeare is more complex than Goethe, who himself had the good sense to admit this in front of Eckermann.

Moreover, there is a hierarchy of arts based on their historical importance. Each work of art either follows or introduces a certain process of formation (Gestaltung). But some of these formations are revolutionary and introduce a new way of shaping everything that is formed (gestalten), and therefore a new way of conceiving spatiality and temporality. For example, in 600 BC, some Greek temples and statues detached forms from their backgrounds for the first time in the history of Homo, thereby paving the way for Plato, Euclid, and Archimedes to perceive and think in this way. This is what happened when the builders of the façade of Laon, thinking they were building a Romanesque basilica, constructed volumes in detachments that were counterbalanced by the new slender structures of the Gothic engineers they were becoming. This is what happened when Giotto – quickly followed by Masaccio – inaugurated an art of the security of plumbness, thereby preparing Galileo’s laws of falling bodies. Or when Bach wrote fugues close to Leibniz’s compossibilities, and Haydn-Mozart accompanied melodies similar to Euler-Laplace’s differential equations. Or when Duchamp boldly dared Trebuchets where quantum effects <21H>, contemporary with Quanta, were acting. And in our era, when Les chemins des écritures in the field of painting <14J1a> or For six pianos in the area of music <15H1d> reveal aminoid formations reminiscent of the amino formations <21G1> that biochemists have been encountering since 1950.

Artists are often oblivious to the revolution of which their particular bodies and brains are the vehicle. Picasso once described Giotto as a great artist and himself as “a public entertainer who understood his time” (Giovanni Papini, Libro Nero). This was because no one around him made him understand that his various cubisms, emerging from his extraordinary copulatory motricity, were giving rise to a space-time in painting, hitherto a space in time, just like Special Relativity and Marcel Proust were doing alongside him. In other words, he was not a deformer, as some Dadaist iconoclasts seemed to think, but rather, he was the introducer of a new formation.

27D2. Love life

In considering Homo specimens as bio-techno-semiotic systems, Anthropogeny was to encounter love, the situation when two or more specimens are such that, in their coexistence, they put themselves into the exhilarating (excited) resonance of their field effects according to homeostasies and allostasies, or still stabilities, instabilities, interstabilities, metastabilities, to the point of forming a genuine intersystem or double system <11L2>. This mutual exaltation will often work at its best in the coaptation of two systems that exploit the anatomical and physiological resources of Partition-Conjunction, particularly in the female/male complementarity of organisms and bisexual orgasm <3D,7H>. However, this does not exclude cases where the other in love is of the same sex or even another living being in general, even an object or an abstract idea, in amor fati <11L2>.

Just like art, this method of flying over dehiscences has given birth to a life, or a sphere of activity, when it takes over the entire existence, at least temporarily. When it achieves the most exact tuning of the essential rhythms and specifically of the horizon. When it tends to perpetuate itself. And that its perseverance requires tactics and tangential strategies. There is no universal detailed description of love as a life, because the intersystemic resonances that constitute its fabric vary too much from one culture to another, from one moment to another, from one group to another, from one singular specimen to another. And yet, one of its common constituents is the sharing of a universe of discourse – that is, of an interlocution and an inter-gesture <11H3> in which the contents matter, but, more importantly, the relations and inflections between these contents, since it is above all a question of logico-semiotic and perceptive-motor field effects. Even the caress cannot be said to be common to every amorous life unless we broaden it to include the imagistic, logical, musical, and respiratory relations of tenderness (tener, flexible, inflexible). The 17th century précieuses were not mistaken when they drew up a “map of tender”.

In its moderate form, love life has almost always been linked to everyday life, especially family life, through the frequent and demanding interweaving of copulation, procreation, and generation. By contrast, in its intense form, it usually belongs to the realm of fate and philters. Aphrodite is not Hera; Venus is not Juno. It was only in the West, during the transition between WORLD 2 and WORLD 3 around 1940, that the idea of couples combining both a common universe of discourse, amorous copulation, and procreation was introduced. This was no longer seen as an unusual exception (the Duke and Duchess of Alençon), but as a tenable social ideal. This implied the concept of the person, the cult of interpersonal dialog, coitus as a form of dialog, etc. Or perhaps it was a first sign of new inter-human relations, made possible by the inherent irenicism of the reticular structures of WORLD 3 <27A2end>.

Love life and artistic life form a system, one opposing the other to some extent and simultaneously complementing it. Because art exists in artworks, and love exists in lovers. In the arts, field effects are thematized; in love, they remain underlying, particularly in the caress. Art includes calculation and leads to the creation of a work of art; love refuses both. In its calculation, art has often cultivated love, but as nourishment or counterpoint. Goethe expounded on this at great length, while Thomas Mann revisited it in his Lotte in Weimar.

A great source of very intense perceptive-motor and logico-semiotic field effects, love life, which has been beautifully documented since the poetry of ancient Egypt, was a powerful theme and factor in art, religion, everyday life as in war and peace, but also science and technology. The love lives of Mozart, Beethoven, Napoleon, and Einstein are not unrelated to their work. The Taj Mahal still stands as a wonder of the world.

27D3. Believing life

When the Anthropogeny encountered the perceptive-motor and logico-semiotic field effects <7A-E>, it immediately observed that they created strange knowledge, as well as strange adhesions in Homo <7I8>. And Anthropogeny defined faith (belief) as an adhesion-knowledge guaranteed by the degree of rhythmization that its contents and its guarantors provoke in the person who adheres to it. The word “rhythmization” should be interpreted here as encompassing the eight aspects of rhythm <1A5>. For Homo, faith is a major means of overcoming his dehiscences.

Faith (belief) is perhaps the most elusive notion for the anthropogeny. In French, we have faith (foi) in the other, faith in the words the other speaks and in the gestures he makes, faith in his commitments and oaths, faith in objects that can be grasped as reliable otherness, faith in concrete or abstract statements – whether understood or misunderstood – emanating from an Otherness that is usually remote. In English, Merriam-Webster also says that “Belief and Faith are often used as interchangeable”, while specifying that faith “implies a certainty on the part of the believer”, which the former does not always involve. There are similar observations on the German die Glaube. And the Latin fides. And the Greek pistis. What's important for Anthropogeny is to see that in faith (belief) the contents (points of knowledge or contract) are not as important as their guarantors (god, totem, sacred herb, inherited piece of furniture, significant word) and that their reliability, as we have said, is measured by the rhythm guarantors emit and by the extent to which this rhythm is in tune with the believer’s overall rhythm. Whence the importance here of tone, accent, turn of existence, tempo, and the seven other properties of rhythm <1A5>.

There are then two major themes of faith. The first is an adhesion-knowledge concerning the Universe, known as religious faith. The second is an adhesion-knowledge concerning hominin groups, called political faith. The groups in question are small, such as the “chosen” peoples of Hitlerism (local) and Zionism (local and nomadic), or they encompass the entire humanity such as the Communist International. However, an anthropogeny will not overlook a third faith, which concerns itself: adhesion-knowledge based on systematized theoretical principles, i.e., philosophical faith.

27D3a. Religious faith. Its sacrifices and prayers. Saintliness and unconditional forgiveness

The life that Religious faith is – which should not be confused with mystical life, that we will consider at the end of this chapter <27F1>, nor with belonging to a religious denomination, which will be addressed in the following chapter <28D2> – is a customary adhesion-knowledge covering the entire Universe. The word religio, likened by Cicero to relegere (to reread, to observe scrupulously), has since been symptomatically perceived as related to religare (to link intensely), whose intensive “re” refers to that of respicere (spicere, re), whence comes respect, and revereri (vereri, re), whence comes reverence and reverential awe.

As a result, the effects of flying over dehiscences through static, kinetic, dynamic, and excited <7A-E> perceptive-motor and logico-semiotic field effects are very powerful here. They hover over the origin and the end of things. On Homo’s origin and end. On the Supreme or the Sublime, the Foundation or the Root, the First or the Original, the Last or the Ultimate, the Hearth and the Encompassing. But even when they include the in(de)finite, as for Christianity and Hinduism, religious flyovers aim for a certain closure, as does the Tao between the opposite poles of yin and yang.

This requires the formulation – or at least, the indexing – of certain ontological principles that must be all the more robust that they are unverifiable, or at least belong to the suprasensible. For example: “Every event in the world proceeds from the Tao, from Dharma, from Providence”, “Shiva and Satkti coexist from the beginning with Vichnu and Lakshmi”, “The Trinity is God in three Persons”, “God, he first loved us”, “There is no God but Allah”, “Behind spirits there is the Spirit of spirits”, “Death is the door to light”, etc. In the same way as political faith, religious faith focuses on certain contents, but especially on their guarantors: Abraham, Moses, Lao Tzu, Buddha, Jesus, and Muhammad, all of whom are relayed by vicars, whose vicariance is organized into clergy (Christianity) or not (Islam). As the Semites say, “faces” are always vaster than the words they proffer.

To feed the field effects that are indispensable to a justification of last resort, religious life has universally mobilized other summit experiences for its benefit (peak experiences <8C>). Experience of love in the Roman-Christian pietas, the Indian bhakti, and the Japanese amida. Experience of extreme art in its images, its music, its architecture: the Vatican Museum stands next to St Peter’s in Rome. Experience of gestures culminating in the dance <11H4>, at times orgiastic, at times processional. Experience of language, to make the creed of God appear to come from a divine or revealing voice (velum, re, removed veil): the verbal splendors of the Vedas, the Tao Te King, the New Testament, the Koran, the Hebrew Bible with its dazzling formulations: “èhiè ashèr èhiè” (Exodus, 3:14), translated by Chouraki as “Je serai qui je serai” (“I will be who I will be”), and rendered in capital letters in the King James Version: I AM THAT I AM. In fact, since the Psalms <22C>, religious faith has generated a distinctive form of sentence, the biblical verse (“an idea surrounded in white”), or the Qur’anic ayât (sign), which are better adapted to Revelation than prose and verse, both of which are all too human, the prose because of its nakedness, the verse because of its mastery. Sacrifice aptly represents the exotropic aspect of religious faith, and prayer its endotropic aspect <2B>.

Religious faith and sacrifice. Heroism and holiness

The Anthropogeny came across sacrifice as early as possibilization <6>, and more particularly since the substitutions of generalized exchange <6G>, with its capacity to work between graspable partners – in trade – or elusive ones – in sacred rites <6G2, 7I7>. Through sacrifice, which separates and/or merges traded elements, the religious believer consolidates his faith by believing that he is perpetuating an approved order (India), reinstating a disrupted order (Mexico), or achieving a desired order (Christianity). In other words, it’s little a question of spending vs. accumulating (Bataille) or of diverting group violence onto a vicarious victim (Girard), or still, of circumventing death and sustaining life (Bergson’s “static religion”), according to the psychological interpretations of the end of WORLD 2.

In 1890, James Frazer undertook to write his mammoth book The Golden Bough, taking as his starting point the kings who were ritually sacrificed all over the world once they had become impotent or disqualified by plagues. Structuralist cultural anthropologies <24B3, 24C2> have observed the structural continuity of sacrifices spanning ethnic groups and eras. The Dogon Nommo, both divine and human, dies and is reborn; as does Dionysus. The Aztec maidens described by Sahagún die in ecstasy, as do certain African kings and queens and devotees of Shiva. Jesus becomes Christ when he dies and is resurrected. Che Guevara today continues a post-mortem existence, in the magic of a solarized photograph. However, the difference between the three “worlds” remains evident here, because the impact of sacrifice is very different when it takes place in the close continuous of the ascriptural WORLD 1A (the Dogon Nommo or the Lovedu Queen); or in the close continuous of the scriptural WORLD 1B (the young Aztec sacrifices); or in the distant continuous of Greek WORLD 2 (Iphigenia and the oxen of the hecatomb); or in a WORLD 2 civilization with reminiscences of WORLD 1 (Jesus of Nazareth, the victim who, from “ben Elohim”, i.e., related to the divine, becomes “huïos toF tHeoF”, Begotten of God); or finally in the discontinuity of WORLD 3 (the “Che” on posters). And even the nuances inside WORLD 2 are violent. The torture of the cross was first understood apocalyptically <13I> as the end of the law, as the imminent Second Coming, as the lower entrance to the heavenly Jerusalem. Then, it became mainly understood as the legal redemption of an original sin from the bourgeois and legalistic Renaissance onwards before becoming the “ultimate Hebraic abjection turning into salvation” for Karl Jaspers.

Sacrifice, which can immolate other victims, can also apply to oneself, in an attitude that transcends the particular modalities of the three “worlds” to such an extent that some people have tried to perceive existentials in heroism and holiness. Which fundamental component of Homo would then lead hominian specimens to (self) sacrifice under certain circumstances or permanently? Every major concept in the first eight chapters of this anthropogeny is part of the answer: the suspense implied by transversality (ch.1); the endotropy of the hominin brain (ch.2); the partial or total abandonment of each (each one) assumed by the en-counter (r-en-contre, in French) (ch.3 ); generalizing indicia (ch.4); indefinitizing indexes (ch.5); unlimited possibilization (ch.6); perceptive-motor and logico-semiotic field effects conveying fantasies of partition-conjunction (ch.7); the presence-absence of the Real vs. the functionings of Reality (ch.8). To which we will add what will be seen in an instant about anticipated death (27F2>.

Like artists, the saints of an era usually tend to move ahead of their times. If we were looking for a saint of WORLD 3, we might consider Etty Hillesum, a Dutch Jewish woman who left for Auschwitz at the age of 27 in 1943, and who experienced all the stages of the deportation of her family and herself without ever forsaking her immediate fraternity, her Pascalian lucidity on the mechanisms of the world and of societies, her ecstasies for fragments of light in the most extreme darkness, a perfect liberty of morals, with not a trace of bitterness for what others call enemies. Kiddush, “sanctification” with the same root as the hymn Kaddish, presumably implies unconditional forgiveness <6G2>.

Religious faith and prayer

And, in the same way as sacrificial exchange is the exotropic recourse of faith, prayer is its endotropic recourse. Prayer has a powerfully rhythmic structure, texture, and growth, both in language and gestures <1A5>, and is sufficiently repetitive or circular – right down to the prayer wheel, the melody, and the recto tono – so that after a period of warming up, it becomes self-sufficient, simultaneously inducing self-sufficiency in the person uttering it, within its close *woruld and the Universe as a horizon. Prayer is appropriate for the dying in terms of their past, the sufferer in terms of their present, the entrepreneur in terms of their future, and the indifferent in terms of their availability. To such an extent that we do not know whether faith generates prayer, or if it is prayer that generates faith. We don’t know either whether prayer presupposes a specific religious faith, or whether it is merely faith in general, being then a sort of acquiescence (respect, reverence) almost entirely devoid of specific content. Yet it is true that elderly hominin specimens who have lost their childhood faith frequently revive their prayers without recapturing their dogmas. Today’s neuropsychology helps us to situate this fundamental anthropogenic phenomenon, where capacities of endotropy, cleavage, rhythmization of hominian brains <2B> are corroborated. As a psychologist of common sense, Jung already observed the autarky of prayer as a homeostatic and allostatic functioning transcending specific beliefs.

Through its role as a last resort and ultimate availability, prayer would seem to exhibit great structural stability throughout the evolution of Homo. So much so that Matthew’s 6:9-13, which will become the Christian Lord’s Prayer, that combines the Kaddish and the Hebrew Shemoneh ‘Esrei (Chouraki, p.1870), were adopted as a common prayer, albeit for one day, in a 1980s symposium on religions, where nevertheless WORLDS 1, 2 and 3 <12B> were crossing. Let us quote these verses according to Nestle’s Greek: (1) Our father, who in the heavens, (2) Thy name let it be held sacred (3) Thy kingdom come, (4) Thy will be done, just as in heaven, so on earth (5) Our bread of the day following (thy epioFsion, of the next day, Bailly) give it to us this day, (6) Forgive us our debts as we also forgive our debtors (7). Lead us not to till the place where trial becomes temptation (peirasmos, experience, trial, temptation), (8) Withdraw us from wickedness. – Overall, there are four acknowledgments. (1) An invocable pole, (2) The sacredness of its designation, (3) The expectation of a general order, (4) The obedience to the internal law of things. And four requests: (5) The basic subsistence of everyone, (6) The remission of fault, (7) The avoidance of too severe ordeal, (8) The non-evil intention, without stretching to the point of postulating an upright intention.

These eight formulas by Matthew (unless, following the usual Trinitarianism of this Evangelist, it would be more accurate to distribute them in invocation + 3 acknowledgments + 3 requests) have some of the apocalyptic overtones of WORLD 1B, such as “let your empire advent” (eltHètato è basileia sou). But we'd find equivalents in WORLD 1A in Whorf’s Hopi and Leenhardt’s Kanak people. And even more so in WORLD 2, where Socrates, according to Xenophon’s Memorabilia “simply prayed to the gods to grant him goods in general, for the gods alone know what things are good”. Aristotle expresses the same idea as a logician: prayer transcends the true and the false, escaping in principle the excluded third. This idea finds an echo in Rome in Juvenal’s Tenth Satire, which states that man is dearer to the gods than to himself (Carior est illis homo quam sibi), thereby following in the footsteps of his contemporary Epictetus: “Mighty Destiny, lead me Wherever you have decreed in your decrees that I must go”. This same choice culminated during the Spanish Renaissance in the “Sume, domine, et suspice”, which summarizes the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius of Loyola, who founded the Jesuits and for whom prayer was well a virtual self-sacrifice: “Take Lord, and receive all my liberty, my memory, my understanding, and my entire will. Thou hast given all to me. I return it to you. All is Thine. Just give me Thy love and thy grace. It is sufficient for me”. François Fénelon’s Quietism would say nothing else in the aftermath of French Classicism, nor will Spinoza’s restful acquiescentia (quies, ad). In the Germanic world, Goethe closes WORLD 2 by echoing Aristotle’s neutrality: “Alles geben die Götter, die unendlichen, / Ihre Lieblingen ganz./ Alle Freuden, die unendlichen. /Alle Schmerzen, die Unendlichen, ganz”. And as Rimbaud was agonizing from a bone cancer in his leg, he just repeated one of Allah’s 99 names: “Allah Karîm!” (Allah the generous). The two nasalizing – hence endotropic – syllables of “amen” suffice for everything. In fact, one syllable is even enough, since the dilation of their initial labial “am” and the folding of their final dental “en” contract them into the single Indian syllable “aum”, or “om”, which was described by 70s American orientalist poet Ferlinghetti as “originally a syllable denoting assent – the ideal inaudible sound of the universe”. The essence of prayers lies in the space between “amen” and “hallelujah”, or quite simply in the repetition of “Ell”, with the backward turned “l” of Elohim and Allah.

And if, one day, WORLD 3 should spawn a kind of religion of Universe <27F1>, Matthew’s eight or (2 + 3 + 3) statements would still be transposable to it roughly as follows: (1) Our Universe, the ultimate implication of our functionings and our presences, (2) That its designation (versus unum) be a theme of respect, (3) That its structures, its textures and its growths (in particular its amino formations) be accomplished without fatally postulating Meaning, contenting themselves with producing Meaning. (4) That the sequences of its compatible complexifying variations be observed by all sciences, experimental, historical, and poetic, (5) That its non-recoverable states-moments enjoy the resources (of energy and information) necessary to their singularities, from day to day. (6) That errors be judiciously forgotten, (7) That prometheism be tempered, (8) That the fault willed for its own sake (radical evil) be spared.

We have used the third person (“that its”) for the sake of minimalism. But you are free to put it in the second person (“that thy”). Faith-belief has often been hesitant about the forms of the verb. Prior to Allah’s 99 names (Eloah), there is a hundredth, which encompasses them all: Huwa (him). Hugo capitalized it: “What do you ask? – HIM”. In the 9th Symphony’s Ode to Joy, the most colossal collective prayer ever produced by Homo, the verb persons are audaciously interchanged: the Principle is referred to by the third person: “überm Sternenzelt / Muss ein lieber Vater whonen”; while the second person is addressed to the “Brüder”, the orants: “Seid umschlungen, Millionen, (. ...) Ihr stürzt nieder, Millionen”, but also addressed, according to the self-engendering characteristic of German Romanticism <30I>, to the mediating experience itself, Joy: “Freude! Freude! // Freude, schöner Götterfunken,/ Tochter aus Elysium,/ Wir betreten feuertrunken,/ Himmliche, dein Heiligtum”.

In addition, Schiller’s and Beethoven’s collaborative effort, in the tradition of Kant’s Critique of Judgment, with which the poet and the composer were familiar, confirms the two characteristics of prayer that we have already identified. (a) It is a rhythmic form rather than a content since Ode to Joy has been used to promote contradictory ideologies, and when performed in a concert, it unites a wide variety of audiences. (b) It is stable over time, insofar as music and phonosemia here run through Matthew’s eight themes and their movements, from the andante maestoso to the allegro agitato. The brief review provided above demonstrates that polytheism, monotheism, the Destiny, and the Universe are all equal in this respect.

27D3b. Political faith. Realpolitik

We shall not confuse political faith with simple political life. The latter, which is as old as hominin societies, involves the day-to-day practice of the social consensus, which we have categorized as everyday life <27A2>. The much more ambitious political faith is a belief in what this consensus should be. Through its powerful and desiring indexations, political faith then drives the entire existence by field effects, a rhythm, a horizon, usually less powerful and less extensive than those of art, love, religious faith, but nonetheless capable – in their momentum – of making hominian specimens surpass their painful dehiscences.

Anthropogenically, political faith is very much posterior to religious faith. It borrows several features to the latter and has really only taken shape wherever there are clear-cut confrontations between determined social organizations, and where the present is firmly separated from the past and the future, with a bias towards the future. For this reason, although we can see the outlines of its group enthusiasm and partisanships in the rivalries between the chieftains of villages in the scriptural WORLD 1A, it only really emerged and gained prominence in the scriptural WORLD 1B, for instance in the theological-political competitions between the cities of Upper, Middle and Lower Egypt.

And it was only in WORLD 2 that political faith fully revealed its two main drivers: (a) a few orientations concerning the group consensus: the patriciate or the plebs, the more state-run or more private enterprise, order or freedom, peace or war; (b) an initiator principle guaranteeing these orientations, a leader or a text, or rather a text guaranteed by a leader. A few floating, sonorous words appeared: “democracy”, “fascism”, “racism”, “anti-racism”, “Führer”, “Duce”, “equality”, “barbarians”, “goï”, “secularism”, “nationalization”, “unbridled capitalism”, “solidarity”, and so on. A few short slogans: “El pueblo // unido // jamas / sera / vencido” (4 + 6). A few emblems, eagles, and flags. Regular liturgies or popular ceremonies (leitos, people, ergeia, ceremonies). Commemorative events linked to the magic of dates: “the man of 18 June”. Wars past, present or future, and at the very least struggles (the “workers’ struggles”).

Given that these are indexations rather than concepts, senses more than significance, the basic notions of mathematics and physics have governed political faith. For Homo cipher, these were the “one” of monarchy or the “Reich”, the “many” of oligarchy, the “few” of aristocracy, and the “all” of democracy. For upright Homo, it was the “high” and the “low”, the “great” and the “small”. And for transversalizing and lateralizing Homo, the “right” (Directa) of order, continuity, tradition, proximity, reality, and the “left” (Sinistra) of movement, discontinuity, change, distance, utopia, etc.

The leader or the political prophet theoretician thus have the same structures, textures, and growths than the indexations they support and guarantee. They can be held responsible for major emergencies, such as war or famine, but this usually comes after the fact, because people are quite unaware of what awaits them immediately before disaster strikes. The first demands made on Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Churchill, de Gaulle, Mao and Che Guevara were to back firmly the group’s general indexes, which are a question of outlook, of silence, of baraka, of simplicity and intimidation, of the appearance of a long-term strategy. If there is a demand for arguments in societies that have become rationalizing such as those of the ending WORLD 2 or the beginning WORLD 3, such arguments are known beforehand and ensure “common error” <25B6>, as appropriate to the faith-belief of large groups. The ideal leader is retrospective and faraway. His funeral glorifies him, whether he was good or cruel to those grieving him. The Gulag wept for Stalin more sincerely than the nomenclatura.

However, at times political faith coincided with structural changes in society and created intense fervor. At the beginning of our era for example, the trade and technical exchanges on the Mediterranean became so widespread and fluid that it became necessary to move from cities like Athens (polis) or Rome (urbs) to an imperium, an empire that was no longer primary – like those of Sumer and Egypt – but secondary. The imperium romanum’s foundations were laid by Julius Caesar. Its structure was built by Augustus, buoyed by a political faith that was liturgically orchestrated by Titus Livius, Virgil and Horace. By the same rationale, at the end of the eighteenth century, applied science made technique so enunciable by everyone that it could be adequately formulated in Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie, placing everyone on an equal footing and thereby invalidating the division of French society into three “states”: the nobility, the clergy and the Third Estate, or even into guilds. A gigantic and lasting wind of political faith swept then from Montesquieu to Napoleon Bonaparte and was embraced by entire peoples.

But such moments are short-lived. Most effects of political faith are unseen, rampant, operating over centuries, metastable. They are too insignificant and more importantly, too dreaded to be formulated. For example, over the last ten centuries in Europe, progressive changes have taken place in public opinion regarding women, children, work, the participation of citizens (Magna Charta), sanity and madness, slavery, serfdom, and so on. But even when such deep-seated movements were accompanied silently or noisily by overt political beliefs and preaching, they hardly resulted from them, because they mercilessly followed a course of events, and especially the course of technique and trade based on the decisive role of productive forces <18L, 26C2, 29A5>. It has to be admitted that the typewriter, the car, the dissemination of positive sciences, telecommunications, and the contraceptive pill have contributed infinitely more to women’s lives in the twentieth century than Simone de Beauvoir’s political faith in the Second Sex.

Just as political faith only truly took shape with WORLD 2, it peaked in the twilight of the latter. It culminated violently and briefly with Fascism, particularly Hitlerism, which was highly aestheticized around Goebbels, Speer and Leni Riefenstahl. It culminated over a longer period with Communism, which was primarily Russian but also global, logomachic and not very aesthetically pleasing. And finally, throughout the twentieth century, with Zionism, which was both global, insofar as it was nomadic, and territorial, in Israel, but existential everywhere. This raises the question as to whether political faith as such, which is necessarily opaque, will survive in WORLD 3, where a reticular structure forces transparency. After all, wasn’t glasnost synonymous with the end of the USSR?

Everywhere, political faith and religious faith have demonstrated great similarities in their structures, textures, and growths, and in their indicia and their indexes <7F>. To such an extent that societies have been able to confuse them, particularly in periods of war and plague. Or move from one to the other several times without realizing it, in times of peace. The one thing they have in common is that their powerful and insistent expressions ultimately exempt them from the truth of their foundation. Augustine’s Confessiones, the Gothic cathedrals, the Flemish 16th century paintings and Bach’s music were all such powerful and coherent expressions of Christianity that, each and all together, they rendered incongruous, for their authors and their audience, the question of whether the Godman who gave birth to them was a reality. Proportionally speaking, something similar also occurred for the author and readers of Karl Marx’s Das Kapital. For the rest, if sacrifice and prayer constitute the appropriate recourse of religious faith, a history of their role in political faith would not go amiss.

Whether religious or political, faith-belief has fed from the five senses differently throughout anthropogeny. As Augustine famously said: fides ex auditu, faith proceeds from the act of hearing (auditus, us); and the role of the spoken word, as a rhythmic truth, coming from within, repeating itself in echoes, affirming itself as foreign and the same, other and identical, is often decisive. In the Koran, many of Allah’s signs affect the eye, although the verbal brilliance of the Koranic verse is the ultimate testimony to its truthfulness. And the Minianka initiates of traditional Black Africa have the utmost trust in the vital fluid of their fetishes because they touch them in the holes in the rock without ever seeing them. Hitlerism was visual, Communism auditory. As it exploited the ancestral resources of Chinese writing, Mao’s Little Red Book combined the authority of the analogue and the digital, which created distinct illuminations and terrors.

The term Realpolitik, “politics based on practical and material factors rather than on theoretical or ethical objectives”, only dates back in English to 1917 (Merriam-Webster). But the concept it encompasses originates much earlier, and even from the very beginning. Indeed, the techno-semiotic animal prefers to replace the complexity of shifting facts with a few stereotyped oppositions (plebs/patronage, tyranny/democracy, fascism/communism, left/right, etc.) particularly in its reasoning intelligentsias. But techno-semiotic Homo also knows, through many of its shopkeepers and craftsmen, and sometimes its farmers – and through a few realist historians, such as Tocqueville – that other forces, which are difficult to perceive and even more difficult to reconcile into a praxis, drive the world. Great politicians are those with the ability to perceive and act on these practical and material factors, while exploiting the rhetorical convenience of a handful of words and slogans indispensable to propaganda. It is a very rare skill, the rarity of which contributes to their adoration and hatred by the masses. The concept of Realpolitik raises the question of whether Realreligion might not also be anthropogenic.

27D3c. Philosophical faith

Most – if not all – philosophies contain an unprovable keystone, an object of faith-belief. For instance, Descartes declared that thought is substance (Soul), and that the idea of the Perfect (God) is clear and distinct. Spinoza wanted the uniqueness of Substance (Selfstandigheit) to lead things to their “adequate” ideas. Leibniz saw every event in the world as the “best of all possible” local event among necessary universal “compossibles” (“that cannot not be”). Fichte derived all science from an “Ich bin Ich”. Sartre believed himself to be so free that he posited that no event could move a conscience (freedom), which can only move itself about things. Parmenides was carried along by a philosophical faith when he opened up the West by declaring that “the being is, the nonbeing is not”. Plato saw things as reflections of ideas. Aristotle postulated an original driving force that “moves without being moved”. Plotinus saw everything as existing, from the spirit to substance, through the “procession and recession of the One”.

With his customary loyalty, Kant <20C3end, 21E2a> was wanting to explain his philosophical faith. He realized that his whole system depended on it and that, unless he explained it, the whole edifice of his three criticisms would be doomed to ruin. The last two hundred pages of his Critique of the Power of Judgment (Urteilskraft) constitute the most complete text on philosophical faith that Homo has produced. Kant notes the rhythmic nature of his faith <7I8>, by measuring it in terms of the unification it produces between his three faculties: sensibility (to feel), understanding (to know), reason (to desire). He also makes a distinction between two kinds of philosophical faith: (1) the faith of his predecessors, which first reached God and the immortal Soul, and then concluded with Freedom-Duty; it was a theoretical faith, which believed itself capable of producing “determinative” judgments about “suprasensible” objects; Kant considered this faith to be inconsistent, even dishonest. (2) His own faith, he said, is not theoretical. It begins with the only in-itself, the only “noumenon”, that we touch: the “human desire (Wille) for the sovereign good”; from which we then rise to God and the immortal Soul, in a practical faith, which is solid but with several limits. This is because the in-itself that it touches at the outset (the desire for the sovereign good) is reached through an imperative that is only “categorical”, categorial (“act according to a maxim that could be universal”), and thus does not include any knowable determination for action. Secondly, the judgments by which this faith elevates itself to God and the immortal Soul are not “determinative” (like those of the understanding) but merely “reflective” (invoking the coherence of our faculties). For Kant, an admirer of the botanist and zoologist Reimarus, these judgments are as follows: (a) the internal end of a plant or animal (the harmony of its parts) cannot be explained by pure mechanics; it requires an “end of Nature”, which can only involve Man, who alone can desire goodness; (b) the “absolute” good is not achievable in this life and presupposes, in order not to be “absurd for us”, an ulterior, eternal life, which undoubtedly intervenes in the mind of the primary ordinator of the ends of Man and Nature. The aesthetic judgment (of taste) has the function of sensitizing to Nature’s internal ends, or even to its more hypothetical external ends (coherence of living or inanimate beings with one another). This pure subjective coherence, which has no determinable object, but awakes to the coherence of the sovereign good, subjective also but with an object, is a propaedeutic to the teleological judgment, and therefore quite naturally occupies the first part of the Critique of the Faculty of Judgment. The Anthropogeny will observe that Kant’s philosophical faith, with its heroic overtones, was prepared by Luther’s, and was the fundamental theme of German Romanticism, especially for Beethoven and Schiller. And Kant insisted that this faith was based on common sense, not scholarly. And that it did not reject revealed religion, in this instance his own Pietism, unlike the strict deism of Reimarus, who was a generation older (1697-1763), and to whose “clarity, precision and breadth” he ascribed an “immortal honor”.

WORLD 3 radically changed the game of Reimarus’s and Kant. The polymerization of amino acids and the RNA-DNA cybernetics have excluded the idea that a living being’s internal coherence presupposes an end to nature. And, in the idiosyncrasies of human behavior, it is rare to include the desire for the supreme good under a categorical imperative. Although it was still very intense in the early Sartre, philosophical faith has lost much of its assurance, both as a scientific and as a psychoanalytical faith. Indeed, a religion of the Universe would imply less faith than abandonment on the part of hominian specimens living as moment-states of the Universe. In this respect, Wittgenstein emerges once again as a hinge between WORLD 2 and WORLD 3 when, in 1950, he dedicates the last days of his life to identifying a “certainty” that would not presuppose philosophical faith, under the title Uber Gewissheit (On Certainty) <24B1>.

27D3d. Bereavements. Acedia

For Homo, bereavement is intimately associated with belief, prayer, and sacrifice, to the point of frequently being at the origin of religious and political beliefs. Very early on, funerals were organized by means of accommodating, manducating, burial, immersion, cremation and dispersal of the corpse. Initially frontal and solemn, these rites were subsequently extended over time by commemorations, sometimes daily, on domestic altars in Japan and elsewhere. As with sacrifice, there are non-commercial exchanges in mourning, i.e., exchanges in which one term is unknown, and even frankly mysterious. A living being has become a dead person; a functioning person has become a non-functioning person, a deceased person (de-functus, de-fungi). These are two states of the same thing. It is unbearable for technical and semiotic hominian specimens to fail to make any connection between two states of the same thing. Funeral and mourning rites are a series of shifts between present and absent elements <6G>. Mourning is one of the most prominent examples of the work of memoration (vs. re-memoration) <2B2>.

But in the case of mourning, the sacrificed person – a profane person who has become holy by dying – no longer results from the initiative of a person or a group, as in the traditional sacrifice, but from an inexorable force, i.e., Fate, Destiny (stare, de, to fix), which determines, in addition to the victim, the time, the place, and the mode of death. This determination is the result of a poorly performed rite in the ascriptural WORLD 1A, where there was no such thing as natural death. Of a beatific (Egypt) or painful (Gilgamesh) inscription in the intense cosmic writings of the scriptural WORLD 1B. Of the sudden cutting of a thread by a Greek Moira or a Roman Parca coming from the underworld, amongst the “wholes” of the Western WORLD 2. Of a process so processual that, after various medical delays, it only signals the fact that individual living specimens belong to the succession of species, as far as the Evolutionism of WORLD 3 is concerned.

Therefore, after the heavy sacrificial exchange of funerals whereby the body is returned to the four primary elements – fire, air, earth or water, depending on the region – Homo still needs the lengthy and vague exchange of prolonged mourning to integrate the unthinkable changeover between living and dead into the indicia and indexes of the *woruld. With the help of prayer, whether clerical or secular. Prayers for the dead, prayers to the dead, prayers of the dead. Blending, in the same way as in prayer addressed to the Principle, the demands, adoration and praise. And, to some extent, instituting an “other world”, which is sometimes close (next world), or at the crossroads of the appropriate “this world” (world 1, 2, or 3).

The invoked living-dead person may also be an animal or even an inanimate object having a living form. The intricate monuments found in the pet cemeteries in the USA are not merely quirks of the wealthy. The Haute-Provence farmer who, at lunchtime, climbed to his highest location and placed his dog in the very center of a large field of lavender, then built her a modest mound of limestone under which she retreats into the immensity of the Sun, shows that an animal can have, in a mountain range in the Basses-Alpes, a tomb that is as liturgical as that of Chateaubriand facing the Atlantic.

Enlightened by mourning, faith is also illuminated by the eclipse of faith, a sort of radical boredom, which the ancients and Petrarch called acedia (a-kèdia, a-cedia, lack of interest). This condition, however, which can be found in political faith and particularly in religious faith, is so characteristic of the latter that it is better to examine it on the occasion of its paroxysm, in certain mystics <27F1>.

27D4. Hateful life

For a bio-techno semiotic system such as Homo, hatred is such a cost-effective means of defending itself against the aggressions of events and establishing itself in autarky <11L3> that it is quite understandable that it should often give rise to lives. Particularly as it is sometimes coupled with beliefs, of which it is the confirming reverse. A Protestant is more likely to hate Catholics than to embrace the profound views of Luther or Johann Sebastian Bach. And a Catholic is more inclined to hate Protestants than to embrace the immense faith of Paul of Tarsus, Thomas Aquinas, or Pascal.

This way, thanks to hatred, the horizon shrinks to a point or to a few points. Presence-absence is reduced to an apprehensible otherness. The in(de)finiteness of desire is satisfied by defined, quantifiable needs for destruction. The last two inhabitants of an abandoned village – a man and a woman – who have never spoken to each other and don’t know why, except that “something” had happened in their parents’ or grandparents’ time, provide a naïve example of a life of hate and its conveniences.

27E. Challenging dehiscences: the comical Life

All things considered, none of the previous lives can completely protect Homo from his dehiscences. As a result, Homo has devised remedies which, instead of filling/plugging his flaws, escaping from them, surfing over them, involve confronting them head-on, while keeping them at a distance and equalizing them, “diffusing” them – in the sense of the English word to diffuse – through subtle or violent displacements and shakings, where logico-semiotic field effects are a resort that is usually more effective than perceptive-motor field effects <7AE>. That is the comical life.

The essential instrument of comical life is language, much more so than painting, sculpture, or music, despite Haydn’s combinatory Witz. This is probably because language alone is sufficiently referential – even self-referential – and adequately distancing – even self-distancing – as to create the tension between designator and designated that is vital in fencing, dodging, and kicking the logico-semiotic field effects of comic. Homo proved this through his texts and theatrics in the strict sense (comedies, farces), that we encountered on the occasion of the theories he built about himself as a result of his languages <22B5>, but also through the diffuse theater – drama – of his everyday life <11H3>.

Comedy can be tackled from the angle of defying the obscene, which arises from Homo’s original dehiscence, that dehiscence which separates technemes and also signs – let’s call them techneme-signs, relatively stable, abstract, mediatisable, and spiritualisable – from immediate, fragile, crudely physiological and anatomical bodies. This radical dehiscence is expressed by the reproachful Russian exclamation: “Biez-obraz-nie!”(without image), and targeted by the Latins with the word “ob-scaevus” (warped, sordid), from which “obscene” probably derives, although many speakers continue to perceive it as coming from “ob-scenus” (through the stage), because the obscene comes from the fact that things and signs appear there from “too far away” and above all “too close”, too “under one’s nose”, and not in the “right distance” of the Greek theatrical skènè <13G1>. Outside the “proper” distance, the most exquisite iris becomes as obscene as the rhetorically enlarged vulva depicted in Courbet’s L’Origine du Monde.

The first form of comic, then, consists in teasing the obscene, whether by circling around it, brushing up against it without being affected by it, or by turning it inside out, by dint of making it a technical and semiotic theme, by instrumentalizing it. For this purpose, Rabelais suggested that the safest route would be a highly rhythmic pile-up, in which the disparities between technemes-signs and organicities – the brutality of the despisable object and the delirious infinity of its variations – would spread out in repercussions that were so unpredictable that they neutralized each other. Sometimes, discrepancy and rhythmic clash occur between the sign-technemes themselves, in an obscenity of language: “My so good wife is dead, who was the most this, the most that in the world.”

When dehiscences are social, they can be defied by exaggerating them to such an extent that the person criticizing them – and possibly those before whom those dehiscences are criticized – appears to escape them, since they are their judges. This is sarcasm and irony, frontal and even rostral thrusts with Plautus, a shower of oblique arrows with Voltaire, but all rhythmically strong enough to ensure that the assertion of judicative infallibility <25B2b > endures.

Unaggressively, the wit can also defy dehiscences by stoking the fire of their designators to the point of focusing attention on them rather than on the designated. This was how Madame de Sévigné showed her power throughout her life in her Letters. In the latter, she recounted the most distressing situations and lowlifes, whilst using a language obliging itself to the heroism of telling it all in such a way that, ultimately, we only see her language, salvific, as it was both so relevant to oneself and deflecting attention from the miseries it expressed, although they were still very much there.

As for humor, it encounters dehiscences – and even the obscene – by knowing the ethos of Homo down to its nooks and crannies <25>, and its illnesses <26>, but it accepts them with temperance, inflection, obedience, almost humility. With humor, in the thing-performance-in-situation-in-the-circumstance-on-a-horizon <1B>, the horizon becomes so present, that not only the thing-performances, but also the situation and the circumstance are relativized. And, whilst in other comical productions, the producer cuts himself off from what he faces and performs more or less in front of an audience and before himself, in humor he counts himself as part of his audience, but also as part of what he and his audience activate in an extreme experience of intercerebrality <2B9>. Everything seems considered, meditated upon, contemplated, displaced, and accepted, to subtly shift its subject matter. The result is that the functionings, thus softened, fade beneath the presence-absence (essential to the horizon) that inhabits them. It is only the English language, which is always astonished to be both Germanic and Romance, that has managed to achieve this untranslatable ambiguity, particularly in Dickens. Merriam-Webster defines the adjective “Pickwickian” as: 1. marked by simplicity and generosity; 2. intended or taken in a sense other than the obvious or literal one.

Humor thrives on the discrepancies between signs-technemes, but also between layers of signs-technemes. Lewis Carroll deployed these bifurcations in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. X, engrossed in his work, receives a phone call from Y telling him that there’s bad news and that Z has died. Thinking it over, X adds “fortunately, he didn’t tell me that Y has died”. Humor plays a crucial role in the Anthropogeny. It ranges from a child’s first grasp of language to the last words of a dying person. In some cases, it is the only element that can be communicated between people of different ethnic groups. Humor is applicable to everything. Even to God. Satan knows it the least.

27F. The Fusion of dehiscences

Despite all of these parries, there remains however the death of others, the insanity of others or of oneself, and the unbearable manifestations of unhappiness. As a result, Homo is forced back to his fundamental relationship with the Universe, in which he is a local and transitory moment-state. His ultimate resource is to reverse his usual active-passive relationship between functionings and presence-absence, where he sees little more than the first ones. On this occasion, Homo puts presence-absence at the heart of the matter, and functionings as such appear insignificant to him.

27F1. Mysticism. The trilogy of religion, belief & mysticism and the three “Worlds”

The Mystic organizes his existence rhythmically in a “presentive” way, i.e. as a series of pure presential-absential functionings <8B9>, ecstasies, rapts, lightning strikes, fusions, cancellations, wanderings. This is what John of the Cross poetically summarized: “Vivo sin vivir en mí / y de tal manera espero / que muero porque no muero” (Coplas del alma), “Para venir a saberlo todo, / no quieras saber algo en nada. (...) / Porque para venir de todo al todo, / has de dejar del todo a todo” (Subida del Monte Carmelo). However, the results differ from one culture to another. In the West – which since Rome has favored the person and then the One-Self, and therefore also the Other-Self – pure presence-absence frequently reveals itself as the radical acceptance of an Other, or of the Otherness in general. In China, India, and Japan, the acceptance of otherness often consists of abandoning the singularities of an organism to the generality of a transpersonal Tao or Dharma. We could imagine WORLD 3 favoring unconditional implications (foldings) in the growths of the Universe<7F>, perceived in this case as the ultimate envelopment of functionings and presences <27D3a>.

This creates a great difference between mystical paths. Because it depends on an Other-I-We, the Western mystic cannot pursue presence-absence voluntarily, even via asceticism, yet he often ties asceticism with mysticism, according to the doctrine of an “ascetic and mystic theology”. For him, presence is of the order of unpredictable grace, a decision by the Other, which can be veiled for months and years in the loss of the rhythm of belief, “spiritual dryness”, the dreaded “acedia” (kedeïa, care, a- privative) <27D3d>, this “grievance”, this dereliction, against which he feels powerless in will and knowledge, and for which in rigor he can never take credit for himself, even if he hopes to accumulate merits for everyone through it, like Thérèse of Lisieux. Or, even if, according to John of the Cross, the adventure of joy (dichosa ventura) can intervene [voluntarily] between pure presence and acedia. Adventure of an obscure night (noche oscura) so inflamed with avid love (con ansias en amores inflamada) that it achieves in negative some absolute enjoyment (gocémonos amado) that opens onto the beatific vision (y vamonos a ver en tu hermosura). On the understanding that “la primera de las pasiones del alma y afecciones de la voluntad es el gozo (contentamiento con estimación)” ["the first of the passions of the soul and of the affections of the will is enjoyment (contentment with esteem)"]. Recalling David: “dilata os tuum et implebo illud”, the soul wife (esposa) is to the amado in a female situation: “el apetito es la boca de la voluntad (...) Ha, pues, de tener la boca de la voluntad siempre abierta a Dios, vacia de todo bocado de apetito para que Dios la hinche de su amor y dulzura” ["appetite is the mouth of the will (...) It must therefore have the mouth of the will always open to God, empty of every bite of appetite so that God may swell it with his love and sweetness"]. Grace has been the most constantly controversial theme in Christian theology, and Gilberte Pascal felt that her brother’s Ecrits sur la grâce was some of those that had required the most thought on her part.

In contrast, the Eastern mystic is master of his paths. His task consists in preparing himself in such a way that enlightenment approaches. Yet even for him, the absolute is scarce. There is an abyss between ch’an, which is within his reach, and the awakening of the true bodhi or satori, which will come to him in flashes, if at all. In both East and West, a final dimension of radical surrender is part of every mystical life. This is where it differs from the possessive life of art, and also from a life of religious or political faith. We will note that ordinary prayer is already set in this self-surrender to vaster forces <27D3a>.

Like all other lives, a mystical life includes achievements that are more or less “healthy” and “sickly”. Very often, health and sickness coexist in innumerable idiosyncrasies <26E>. Some “psychotics” are so little allocentric that they experience even the slightest concessions they make as absolute loves, which they theorize with dizzying penetration, and whether believers or atheists they willingly consider themselves to be mystics. Still, there is no advantage for an anthropogeny to compare President Schreber with the two Teresa, of Avila and of Lisieux. For those two, erotic experiences contribute to a general rhythmization of existence over a vast horizon in the enjoyment of Partition-Conjunction according to an open fundamental fantasy <7I5>. For the former, an Austrian president of the tribunal and Freud’s patient, similar experiences lead to breaks in rhythm, a flight of horizon, compulsional fantasies <7I6>, under an internalized social verdict. “How can I, president of the tribunal, desire to be fucked by God?” The case of Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179) is particularly instructive because we can find there both the root of migraines, in the phosphenes and scotomas of her drawings, and the speculative fulfillment in her mystical and scientific texts. This is a rare example where cleaved generativity and rhythmic generativity <26B3> intersect so extensively and so clearly. In the future, the neuro-physiological foundation of ecstasies will be better understood as our knowledge of neuro-mediators, especially cerebral ones, increases, from arousal and focusing enhancers to endoanaesthetizing and fusing molecules, related to endomorphins. However, even then, if we are to understand these aspects of mood or perception-memory, we will have to situate them within the general system of the hominid X-same <11>, with its field effects and its distanciations being capable of both great mastery and extreme abandonment.

It will come as no surprise that mystical life is usually regarded somewhat unfavorably by established religions, insofar as religious faith is collective, consensual, just like political faith <27D3>, even where the salvation is individual. For Churches, the mystic is at best “a” singular subject of a particular vocation that does not interfere with that of the community, mostly concerned with social “tuning”, as far afield as China and India. The mystic Al-Halladj, who proclaimed “ana al-haqq” (I the truth ), was executed in Baghdad under the Abbasids in 922.

Anthropogeny has just used three terms – religion, belief, and mysticism – several times. We might wonder whether their juxtaposition does not suggest an enlightening distinction. So, religion would have prevailed in the ascriptural and scriptural WORLD 1, where the hominin specimen saw himself primarily as attentive-respectful of the things around him, and therefore as being religious according to the Ciceronian etymology (relectio), or even the common etymology (religatio). Belief would have been the prevalent characteristic of WORLD 2, which was the only one concerned with dogmas, deriving from its conception of truth, as the adequacy of intelligence to reality, and culminating in the Western notion of consciousness (scire, cum), which key was either the Christian creator God, or the Kantian or Hegelian Homo legislator. A certain mysticism would characterize WORLD 3, insofar as its advanced understanding of functionings invites it to perceive a contrario the originality of presence-absence. Neither Wittgenstein nor Bataille – however liberated they were from beliefs and even from religion – shied away from the word mystic, which, incidentally, is not at odds with Marguerite Duras’ “Tu me tues, et tu me fais du bien” (“You kill me, and you do me good”). In preparation for this kind of mysticism, we find a “sacrality without belief” in Heidegger, and a “holiness without belief” in Levinas’ Kaddish, which were both revisited by Derrida in Foi et Savoir (1996). The latter adds the non-rapport or “absolute interruption” in Blanchot, and even the “unconditional forgiveness” in Le siècle et le pardon (2000). Surely, if mysticism might seem ambiguous, presentiality would be more certain. And we would then have an anthropogenic trilogy: religion, belief, and presentiality, with the prevalence of each according to the three “worlds”.

However, this type of articulation reopens the question of religion, in the broadest sense. Indeed, while WORLD 3 appears to irrevocably discredit belief, insofar as it arises from a Universe where functionings and presence were more or less articulated by structures and textures, and therefore by consciousness (scire, cum), and even by an a priori consciousness, this WORLD 3 does not discredit presentiality, according to the primordial articulation: functionings/presence-absence. This might reformulate the metaphysical – or at least the ontological – question: why, how, or simply along what pathways do functionings and presence(s)-absence(s) exist in the Universe. And, since there is no describable connection between the two (given that presence is indescribable), could there not exist another kind of connection, favoring another attention, another universal re-lectio or re-ligatio (singular or collective), in a religion of Universe <27D3>?

Homo is prolific in inventing notions-ideas-concepts of respectful attention. It cannot be ruled out that he will one day devise some adapted to a Universe made up of amino and aminoid <7F,21E2a> formations, either learnedly or popularly. In the BBC’s PROMS, the chorus and orchestra of Tippett’s The Mask of Time provided what was perhaps the first service of the cult of WORLD 3, in the same way as Beethoven’s 9th symphony and Missa Solemnis were a final service of WORLD 2.

27F2. Anticipated death

Death, as an animal phenomenon, is trivial. It involves a termination in the activity of the nervous centers, which can occur without suffering, during sleep, or by accident. Otherwise, death may occur after a gradual period of drowsiness, sometimes accompanied by pain, which is relieved by various endorphins, such as the one that made Livingstone insensible, when struck down by a lion. However, the “Thou shalt die” of the first chapter of Genesis has almost universally been understood as the major punishment for Homo’s original Sin, which is Possibilization <6A>. The term agony, derived from the Greek agôn (struggle), portrays the death of the techno-semiotic animals as a struggle, and even as the ultimate struggle. Heidegger closed WORLD 2 with the affirmation that the foundation of Homo is his being-turned-towards-death: Sein zum Tode.

For Homo, death is the ultimate scandal. Homo’s constituent signs and languages were made to specify (vs represent) things-performances <1B3>. Death is the non-performance, the non-thing, even the non-functioning. Other than the corpse it leaves behind - which is eminently a sign, sôma sèma - there is nothing to say about it, nothing to imagine, nothing to set to music, nothing to schematize in writing. Admittedly, death mobilizes all the ideations of presence-absence: eternity, simultaneity, infinity and universality, spontaneity, freedom, subjectivity <8D>. But unlike the describable functionings, presence-absence is indescribable.

In the face of this fundamental techno-semiotic adversity, Homo tried to constitute a sphere of activity-passivity, a life, by over-semantizing what can’t be semantized. Post-mortem, hominian groups practiced “survival” from an early stage, through primary burial (on site) or secondary burial (after repatriation of the corpse), or through mummification that preserved the outline in the absence of viscera, or even through cosmic aerial and fluvial diffusion of its outline and viscera by incineration and dispersion in the river <14E>. Ante mortem, super-semantizations gave rise to the parental blessing or curse, and even to the months-long medieval gatherings of vassals around a sick suzerain, which confirmed the indestructible (feal, lige) bond of feudalism. And finally, combining the ante mortem and the post-mortem, a kind of paroxysmal over-semantization was achieved by anticipating death through the tonality of existence. “To study philosophy is to learn to die”, decided several Stoics, and “suicide, this withdrawal of oneself by oneself (caedere sui), is sovereign death”. Likewise, by anticipating the torment of death from the time they reach puberty and then undergoing it in the end as the ultimate confirmation, the Iroquois warriors created one of the tightest linkages between anticipated death and mystical abandonment.

Next to over-semantizations, a discreet and effective assumption and anticipation of death can be found almost everywhere in what might be called the last humility, when Homo bends towards the humus: “And I lean, oh my God! my soul towards the grave / As a thirsty ox leans its forehead towards the water” (Hugo). A shift toward general entropy from the local and transitory negentropy, that a life is. In WORLD 1, it is the old Eskimo woman who can no longer chew skins for tanning, who is now useless to the clan, and returns to melt into the ice pack. Or it is, the young black man who has been given eight days to live by his doctor, and spends them as “naturally” as the days before. In WORLD 2, it is the death of the maid Félicité in Flaubert’s Three Tales. And, perhaps now, in WORLD 3, the grand cycles of “things”, ranging from the life to the death of stars and galaxies, are becoming sufficiently apparent for some people to lose themselves in them, without too much surprise or resistance, content to lay down their heads.

27F3. The celebration or the stunning of dehiscences

There is no hominin society without celebration. Some even believe that celebration preceded all other forms of life, except everyday life. Just like games, celebrations are relatively limited in time and space. But unlike games – which are saturated in rules – they are protected by their spatio-temporal limitations to activate-passivate, or at least graze on, all the limits of the possible <6> without unduly threatening the group’s existence. Through the trance, in Africa. Through disguise, in Venice. Through the combination of trance and disguise in the Samba of Rio de Janeiro. In all cases, through the debauchery of the rhythm itself. We wanted to evoke celebrations after all the other lives, after the other attempts at filling/plugging Homo’s dehiscences, because, having as theme the limitless possibilization, celebrations summon them all – or foreshadow them all – by intersecting everyday life, whether in war or peace, gambling, entertainment, speculation, art, love, political faith, religious faith, comical production, mystical life, as well as anticipated death, even if it is only to graze on them.

However, in this case, the ritual celebration defined as “life” is no more important than pervasive celebration, the one that constantly infiltrates the most trivial and the most serious of circumstances. More than the ritual one, this pervasive celebration is found in every society, even if Black Africa has supplied the most obtrusive example, since there, gestural and musical rhythm are practiced at all hours, on every occasion, and around every object.

27G. Balancing lives: savoir-vivre, notoriety, fashion. Culture

The different lives that we have described are so essential to Homo that all Hominian specimens practice them all to a greater or lesser extent. And yet, each of us must balance them in terms of their influence, their moments, and their places, according to our society. This social balance is inevitable in the rhythm of existences <26>. We might call it savoir-vivre. For circumstances linked to the Renaissance <30G>, the word was coined in French in the sixteenth century, meaning “the art of directing one’s life”. In the bourgeois seventeenth century, it was narrowed down to mean “good manners” <30H>. The word is so pleasing, it so clearly denotes that the art in question is a matter of gustation (sapere, sapire) and not mere knowledge or practice, that the English language adopted it as such, savoir-faire, to denote its original meaning. Later, its narrowed sense was commonly translated as “good manners”.

In any complex society, there is a group of people who set themselves up as role models, the patrons of good manners, through their morality, ambition, vanity, and inevitably by their notoriety. In French, they are the mondains, the people who “know their world”, i.e., the cosmically ordered universe (cosmos, mundus), to which newcomers are only admitted once they have “entered the world”. This group, which perceives itself as select, generally has its own defined venues and times. In Paris, the salons and, more democratically, the cafés have served this purpose for four centuries. Here, politicians, economists, musicians, clerics, painters, industrialists, and crooks mingle, all practicing different approaches to life (some more playful, some more mystical, some more religious, some more humorous, etc.), but in such a way that they all contribute sufficiently to a sense of general balance to remain mutually compatible. Pascal called it a matter of finesse, and Montaigne believed it was a question of reciprocal friction (polishing). Every society needs a certain amount of worldliness and notoriety. Even anarchism is no exception. In an attempt to escape it, Diogenes had to renounce the human condition and was called a cynic, from kuôn, dog. But this did not prevent him from becoming famous and even celebrated (celeber, socially widespread), as worldly quotation.

Every constant stimulus quickly wears out, and like everything else, worldliness requires renewal. These are fashions, which combine the traditions of the common way of life and its resurgence, at least since the Greek WORLD 2, and even as far back as the scriptural WORLD 1B of the primary empires. Fashions concern mainly the most fundamental aspects of life: food, clothing, gestures, language, and eroticism. And they include a touch of chic, an intangible element by which each individual aligns himself globally with everyone else while remaining himself through a few selected details. Fashions are rarely just fashions. As surface movements, they betray profound movements all the more naively because they are believed to be passing. Proust summed all this up, theoretically and practically, in A la recherche du temps perdu, which was written at the same time as Anatole France’s observed that the length of sleeves reveals more about a society than its philosophies.

In this respect, the Industrial Revolution simply added effects of mass and specialization. It turned fashions into one fashion. It pushed chic to the extent of snobbery and dandyism, words that appeared with the Industrial Revolution in around 1780. The Industrial Revolution replaced the honest 17th century man, “who has a glimpse of everything and grasps nothing”, with the cultured men. It also invented Culture, still unknown to Littré, who knew only the (minusculated) cultures of fields and minds. From the 19th century onwards, Culture (now uppercased) supposed that artistic life had become cut off from everyday life. Instead of being the preserve of the most refined craftsmen, art belonged now to specialists, who were often glorious despite being cursed. Whole groups saw themselves as cultured because they belonged to this exception. Many of the 19th century bourgeois who developed industrial products that were unnatural and uncrafted – and thus considered unattractive and even ugly by the traditional ideologies that had no place for them – were redeeming themselves from being castigated by the artists, by supporting them at great expense.

Regarding the weighing of lives, Anthropogeny will be attentive to the fact that the late twentieth century witnessed a major conflict between Science and Culture. In several democracies, Culture has given rise to Ministries of Culture whose electoral clientele, aims, and means are similar to those of the Ministries of Propaganda in the totalitarian regimes of the middle of the century. But Archimedean science, despite being subject to conflicts of influence like all human endeavors, eludes Propaganda, hence Culture, in terms of its content and methods. Physicists, chemists, and biologists, however eminent, cannot be said to have culture, to be cultured, or even cultural, unless they listen to a lot of music, speak Sanskrit, or read their ancestors Euclid or Vesalius in the text. Scientists can be worldly, but their milieu will suspect them if they gossip in salons. There is nothing more ethically untamable, nothing that makes more fun of good manners than science.

So, contemporary national education systems, torn between Culture and Science, struggle between propaganda – including that of Language, with its orthophony and orthography – and anti-propaganda inherent in Research. Consequently, Homo is shifting from the Cosmos-Mundus-Dharma-Tao-Quiq-Kamo to the Universe <21E>, right down to the way he balances his lives and his savoir-vivre. The Internet, by making research communications escape from the mundanity (culture) of reading committees and the media, can only reinforce this shift.

SITUATION 27

Given the range of Homo’s idiosyncrasies and complexions, there are a considerable number of lives <26E1>. Through its simplicity, the panoply proposed here has the benefit of demonstrating the extent to which they form a system, with its compensations. It's their system that interests the Anthropogeny. Their infinite iridescence is the affair of novelists.