We could have spoken of possibles, and even of possibilization, as a tendency to move within possibles, in our very first chapter, where we saw that Homo's transversalizing body cut up his environment into coaptable and substitutable segments, therefore transforming it into a *woruld (world, Weld, wereld) <1B1>.

Indeed, through their substitutability, the segments of techniques grouped in panoplies and protocols are grasped as capable of being elsewhere than where they are, or able to be what they are at another moment, or still, to transform into something other than what they are. Homo's angulator and processional vision <1C1> adds that the segments can also be grasped under another angle or in other reciprocal slidings. And the hominid associative and neutralizing brain indicates that the same given can be situated at diversely neutralized, general, blurred levels of apprehension <2B2>. Possibilization was even present since the walk with its eight aspects of rhythm: alternation, interstability, accentuation, tempo, self-engendering, convection, strophism, distribution by nodes, envelopes, resonances, and interfaces <1A5>. Indeed, the rhythm can be defined very well in two words: as the possibilized reiteration.

However, we felt that it was more frank to introduce the possibles and possibilization after putting in place indicia and indexes. Because technique is not enough, we also need indiciality <4> and indexation <5> to open up the order of thematization of one segment by another, in distanciation and not only at a distance. And, the possible is only really itself when the notions of "under other forms", "elsewhere", "in other times", "under another angle", "in other processional slidings " escape the weight of the functional materiality of technical thematization. Furthermore, there is only frank possibilization if, in the handling of segments, the endotropic regimen of the associative and neutralizing brain becomes increasingly independent from its exotropic regimen. Indiciality and indexation contribute greatly to this independency.

In any event, the possibilization of segments and the possibilized segments definitely open the anthropogeny. Because, next to the definition of Homo as techno-semiotic animal, the other richest and surest is the definition that sees Homo as the possibilizing animal.

6A. Meditation, contemplation, consideration. Desire versus super-predation

It goes without saying that possibilization, as it put itself in place, gave hominid specimens immense physical powers over their environment, rival species and their own congeners. So, biologists like to say that Homo is the super-predator because its possibilized predations are unlimited in their ends and in their means, and that Homo therefore places itself above all predator-prey-predator chains.

But there is a risk that this manner of speaking could induce error. Indeed, predation is caudal-rostral, even when it acts by the band, such as with packs of wolves that hunt their game diagonally. In contrast, Homo's body is transversalizing <1A2>, like the panoplies and protocols that it opens <1B>. Therefore, for Homo, predation - except in some rare and extreme cases of urgency - is never more than a possible amongst others. It is as fragile and temporary as any other possible.

Specifically, we should not confuse with predation (even if the latter is detoured and differed) this hominid performance that power is, even when power seems to limit itself to monopolizing the resources available in one place and to exploitating other people. In French, power (pouvoir) is both verb and substantive. It shares its etymology with strength (puissance in French) but also with possible and possibilization, of which it stirs all aspects, and in particular the pure thematization. And, as we have seen, the pure thematization culminates in indexations and indexes that are infinite (indefinite) by dint of being empty <5G2>, and therefore typically possibilizing.

Therefore, through possibilization, Homo not only sees, hears, acts etc. like all prior animals, but he also meditates, he measures and he proportions (modus, measure, proportion), since its indicialities and indexations impose comparative delimitations everywhere. Further, Homo contemplates, he keeps its environment together as though it were a temple (templum, cum), i.e. a place delimited by the stick of an augur to serve as an area of intense indiciality and indexation, even as a mantic. Also Homo considers, and thus he assembles its environment as he does for the stars (sidera, cum), which of all indicia carry his indexations the farthest, making him an astrologist <5H2>. Lastly, through its things-performing-in-situation-in-the-circumstance-over-a-horizon, Homo desires, grasping everything, objects, others, actions-passions, like from the stars (sidera, de), as beings from afar, into activations-passivations that thematize presence for him <2B10>.

Whether he meditates, contemplates, considers or desires does not only mean that Homo sees and hears together a lot of "things" that can be counted and substituted, but also that he keeps them in suspense at the same time as he weighs them (pendere, sus-, sub-). Thinking (pensare) is the frequentative-intensive form of weighing (pendere). When standing in a declared frontality, and even more so when seated. Rodin's Thinker compatibilizes verticality and horizontality, referential stability and guard, vigilance and floating attention, opening around him the technicizable segments of the *woruld like a field of possibles.

The passage from caudality-rostrality to transversality takes nothing away from the momentum of possibilization. That in less than forty thousand years (40 kY), and especially in less than two centuries (0,2 kY), Homo Sapiens Sapiens should have succeeded in displacing the ecological balances resulting from 5 billion years on a planet like the Earth is a rather good demonstration of the organizing and perturbing capacities of a brain that has become meditative, contemplative, considering, weighing, suspending, desiring.

6B. Modes of existence: submission/bluff, confrontation/isolation, seriousness/play, exploration/coquetry, dream/reverie

Exotropic circulation, where the brain centers on things, and endotropic circulation, where it more or less works in a closed circuit, constitute the primary attitudes of an animated organism <2A3>. In such a way that the prevalence, or initiative, of one of these two circulations gives way to fundamental modes of existence in an animal or hominid specimen : bluff or submission, seriousness or play, confrontation or isolation, exploration or coquetry, dream or reverie. It is there the primary, and most fundamental field of hominid possibilization. As technical and semiotic being, Homo thematizes the modes of existence, multiplying them, slicing them, combining them and nuancing them to his wishes. Higher and lower animals display the same modes of existence than Homo, but with less resources.

Yet, even possibilized by Homo, the relations between both cerebral circulations (endo-exotropic) are not infinite. And we find ourselves here in the presence of a relatively closed system that a Heideggerian philosopher would call "existential". Not because this combinatorial does not result in infinite subtleties, like Mozart's music is the vastest demonstration; and it is not for nothing that this musician excelled both in opera and concerto, both genres of the mood. But because, in this relatively closed system, even the most fleeting nuances intervene within the framework of an elementary combinatory.

We will try to suggest this combinatory in a table, which proved sufficiently relevant and exhaustive that a logician friend of the author should remind the latter that he had noted at first glance that the author had forgotten the "confrontation/isolation" case. Here is the presentation of the table. "A" names any hominid specimen and "B" names what A finds in front of him: something inert, an animal, another hominid specimen. The term "exo" designates exotropic cerebral circulation and "endo" designates endotropic brain circulation both for A and B, at least when the latter is animated. The signs ">>" and "<<" mark a strong drive, the ">" or "<" signs indicate a weak drive. Therefore, we shall read "exo<<endo": "The endotropic circulation strongly drives the exotropic circulation". Where a mode of existence is deduced in two lines, the first corresponds to moment 1, the second to moment 2; and both moments, to be read in boustrophedon [from left to right and then from right to left], are thence in circularity, 2 reintroducing 1. As for the inverted disposition "endo-exo" of A and "exo-endo" of B, it follows from what A and B are supposed to face one another.

Here, the word bluff comes from the English "to bluff", meaning "to deter (discourage) or frighten by pretence (tension forward, pre-tension) or a mere show (pure manifestation) of strength (force)" (Merriam-Webster). For the rest, the French etymology makes a sufficient phenomenology when it signals that submission means putting oneself under; that confrontation takes place face to face; that isolation means constituting oneself into an island (isola); that exploration is not without effort and even without cries (plorare, ex); that the complexities of coquetry are suggested by the behavior of a cock; that dream and reverie (r-esver) are about going here and there, wandering and wandering off - the former outside of reality, the second by caressing reality from afar; that play (jocus) and seriousness (serius) are a couple (joca/seria, joco seriove), the seriousness of A going off exotropically from the B reality - whether inert or living - to react endotropically over it, whereas in the game A goes from an endotropic grasping that it imposes to B reality in the form of rules ("the rules of the game") and only takes into consideration the returns of B reality within the framework of these rules, the rest being precisely put off-play. Philologists will note that "serius, seria, serium" was only an adjective, often in neutral plural seria: one says "Serious things", whereas, as it probably befits possibilizing Homo, jocus was a substantive, even a god for Horace: Jocus. They will also observe with great interest that the French "jeu" comes from Latin jocus, which insisted on the disengagement, and not from Latin ludus which insisted on the exercise aspect, to the extent that it both meant "game" and "school" (ludi magister, schoolmaster).

Bluff and submission deserve specific attention and a place at the top of the list, because they clearly make the distinction between possibilization and super-predation. We could naively think that for Homo, submission results from a constraint or from bad luck. Yet, when we observe the role-playing games of children (and adults) we see that in the servant/master couple, most want to occupy both positions in alternation: that of slave-serf, and that of master. Everything then happens as if hominid specimens, and already some animals, would immediately perceive occupable positions, taking part cerebrally (virtually, endotropically) to both, regardless of the position they currently occupy. Moreover, we find in many a predilection for the positions of submission. Perhaps because there are more weak than strong people, but also because it is from submission that both positions are better grasped and possibilized simultaneously (Hegel made it the core of his slave and master dialectic ). Neither antique slavery nor great modern dictatorships can fully be explained without the pleasure of commanding for a few and the pleasure of obeying for most. Provided we grasp the "commanded/commanding" couple as possibilized and possibilizator.

The anthropogeny does not propose to complete a general theory of any of the alleged modes. So, it goes without saying that exploration is not limited to the >> << / << >> cycle, which would make it a simple suite of confrontation and isolation. When successful, exploration often results in seriousness; when thwarted, it sometimes takes refuge into the game. Here, we contented with observing that the fundamental modes of existence of Homo, or at least several of them, find their starting point in the available relations between the exotropic and endotropic regimen of our brains.

6C. Categories of possible

We must renounce to make an exhaustive inventory of the eventualities of possibilization, as by definition it is an indefinite opening. But possibilization is crossed by some large articulations, some of which are categorial - which means that they distribute fundamental forms of judgement (katègoreFeïn, agoreFeïn, kata, speaking against, making visible, judging).

Several of these categories of possible are forming the summit of metaphysics, and would therefore seem to be not very accessible. At the same time, they belong so closely to Homo's possibilizing transversality that they inhabit the daily lives of all hominid specimens and are perceived by children from a very early stage, at the same time as humor. Up to the point that the anthropogeny may suppose that these categories inspired the behaviors of the first upright primates, long before the implementation of a detailed language <16, 17>, or even a massive language <10D>; because the gesture, analogizable and digitizable, suffices here through its indicia and indexes.

6C1. The virtual. The difficult and the easy

"Things" (causes) grasped by transversalizing, neutralizing and conceptualizing Homo's perceptive-motor circuits, and by the same token indicialized and indexed, are given as swollen (pregnant) with possible realizations that are contained within them virtually (virtus, virtù, secret virtue). The virtual, through the distance and distanciation that it establishes between the possible and the reality, leads to the difficult/easy couple that is unknown to anterior animals, caught up as they are recoilless in the obstacles encountered and in their efforts to overcome them. We shall note on this occasion that for Homo, "difficult" is linked to the required physical efforts, but also often to the incompatibilities of the technical and semiotic series that he has to intertweave.

6C2. The excluded

Possibilization opens a field where "things" (causes) are chosen, and thus, simultaneously, because of the macrodigitality of hominid indexes, others are excluded, either temporarily or definitely. The excluded of such choices could have been chosen and thus "could have been". The problem, whether practical or theoretical, for metaphysician Homo will be to know what weight of being, reality, real he should attribute to this "could have been" compared to "being".

6C3. The one having-missed-her/his/its-conditions

If our planet's climate or tectonic conditions had been different, there would have been other species, even other branches. These different branches did not occur. However, they were not absolutely impossible, they were possible under other conditions. This possible under condition applies to familiar phenomenon: the weather could have been good, even if the weather was bad. Very close to reality, almost real, the one having-missed-its-conditions is particularly worrying for Homo.

6C4. The imagined

For transversalizing Homo, the endotropic regimen of the brain provides endlessly proliferating imagined that carries existing, virtual, excluded, not-having-had-its-conditions. This imagined can then try to realize itself in the actual, by exploiting its virtualities for example, according to the slopes of the easy and the difficult. But it can also suffice itself endotropically, either by remaining in simply envisaged means and ends (visus, in), or by producing totally self-sufficient consecutions that no longer even aim at the order of means and ends, and content with proliferating aggregative syntaxes (AND), disjunctive syntaxes (OR), conditional syntaxes (IF... THEN), into an almost pure possibilization. These possibles of the imagined are the privileged material for reverie.

6C5. The impossible

There is also some impossible when a goal is out of reach, if a means fails, if the various elements that would form a thing-performance-in-situation-in-the-circumstance-over-a-horizon are incompatible amongst themselves. But, in virtue of possibilization, impossibility is not merely a fact as with anterior animals, it is additionally a crossed out, refused possibility. This is why for Homo, the impossible is itself part of the possible, having been possible endotropically, or rather considered endotropically as possible before being refused. This refusal is therefore never a pure and simple offside. Anthropogenically, the impossible is not nothing. Under Homo's yes/no indexes, the possible and impossible will even become one of the basic applications of macrodigitality, and one of its vertigoes or lightning strikes in power. A lightning strike limited in human power, unlimited in divine power.

It is symptomatic of the relations between possible and impossible that a hominid specimen should one day have asked oneself if God could do that the three angles of the triangle should not be equal to two right angles; that all the lines drawn from the center to the circumference should not be equal; or generally, that contradictories "should be together". It is even more symptomatic that it should have replied yes (Descartes, Letters to Mersenne dated 27 May 1630 and to Meslant on 2 May 1644).

6C6. The condition of the being

In the end, the opposition of the possibles to the impossibles makes that the possibility becomes an indispensable condition of every being. Inversely, every being shows its own possibility just because it is: "ab esse ad posse valet illatio" (from the being we may infer the power of being).

6C7. The necessary and the contingent. Opportunity. Coincidence

For the hominid brain, the necessary is then what cannot not be, it is what of which the conditions of possibility comprise the present existence. In front of the hominid brain the necessary simultaneously defines the contingent (tangere, cum) as what can (could) not be. For Leibniz, one day Homo will invoke the necessary as ultimate reason for being. But he will be embarrassed to decide if the conditions of possibility so invoked must be physical or only mental. Or still, and this is extreme rationalism, if, mental, they are not already physical in some way.

For Homo, the non-necessary has at least four forms: eventuality (venire, ex), contingency (tangere, cum), occasion (cadere, ob), coincidence (cadere, in, cum). All refer to encounters (hazardous, aleatory, stochastic) between independent series. Under the form of contacts or falls. Fantasmatically, the atoms of Democritus were falling into space and the events of the cosmos resulted from their shocks and skirmishes.

6C8. The spontaneous, the available, the suspense

Sometimes then, the possible has a so good face that it seems to naively implicate its passage from virtual to actual, from the imagined to the actual, from the reason for being to the being, in a sort of will that is independent and without constraint, like flowing from a natural source: it is spontaneity (spons, spontis, source). Correlatively, sometimes possibility maintains an open expectancy, non-oriented, a kind of fecund passivity. It is then availability (ponere dis, pose as a double).

Finally, possibilization allows, apart from the expectation of the possible and the impossible, the settling in intermediate states, which we call suspense (hang above): suspense between virtual and actual, between easy and difficult, between exotropic and endotropic, between being and non-being, between the possible and the impossible, between the sufficient and insufficient conditions, between the contingent and the necessary, between the active and the passive. The épochè (ep-ekHein, standing above) was a modality of suspense for the Greek Sceptics. Like the nirvana (nis, vâti, out of, reach) in India. The preposition "entre" (in French) or "between" (be, *twa) as it intervenes in the between-two, is of a considerable anthropogenic scope. We find it in one of the most sophisticated forms of the possibilization, the "putting between brackets", whether it is logical or ontological.

6C9. The compossible

However, when envisaging the possible, Homo is most often interested in the compossible, meaning not the isolated possibles but those that can coexist concretely (crescere, cum). This is probably what the following expression targets: "politics is the art of the possible" to mean that it is the art of producing decision that, instead of starting from abstract principles, take into consideration, on the occasion of a thing-performance, all the dimensions of a situation-in-the-circumstance-over-a-horizon. From a hominid perspective, the postulation of the existence of compossibles is even stronger than that of the possible, and for a while, Homo thought he could see (like Leibniz) the substances and events of the world engender themselves in virtue of their best compossibility inside an infinitely possibilizing divine intelligence.

6D. Possibilized affects

Affects, selected to support the urgent or prolonged behaviors <2A4>, have been them too the field for possibilization, which extended or sometimes reinvented them. Whether they are affects of liaison, such as pleasure and attraction, or affects of escape, such as pain and fear.

6D1. Pleasure, pleasures, enjoyment, joy

Animal pleasure often comprises a Baldwin reaction, meaning a perception inducing a motricity, which renews the perception that in turn re-induces motricity. Like the alternations of thirst and deglutition in bibition, that quenches thirst. Or the to-and-fro of pressure-relaxation of copulation.

For Homo, this cyclic mechanism extended and intensified thanks to transversalization and conceptualization (association-neutralization) which allow him to treat things-performance with insistence, and to maintain them in a certain meditating, contemplating, considering, desiring distanciation suspended in a surfing sliding from one situation-circumstance-horizon to another. Hominid pleasure is the possibilized pleasure up until complaisance (placere, cum). Therefore, French easily slides from singular "plaisir" to plural "plaisirs", signifying incessant passages, dosages, modulations, excitations, allostasis: "il court les plaisirs" (he runs from pleasure to pleasure).

As a result, hominid pleasure goes hand in hand with rhythm and its eight characteristics <1A5>. So much so that it would be safer to reserve the word pleasure for Homo, who is alone capable of rhythm, therefore of possibilized repetition; while for animals we would speak of contentment (continere) and alacrity; the Latin alacritas was applied to horses. Unfortunately, this use, which would enlighten the anthropogeny, is too contrary to the uses of physiologists who use the term pleasure widely and we will speak therefore of "possibilized pleasure" in the singular, or of "pleasures", the plural of which marks possibilization in itself.

Following the French semantic, Homo ultimately activated several nuances of possibilized pleasure. Diffuse pleasure is that which accompanies some technical and social practices without being cultivated for itself. Pleasures, plural, insist on the sliding passage from pleasure to pleasure in a renewal which is thematized as allostasis. Enjoyment signals the case where pleasure insists rhythmically and puts in resonance (almost) all the instances of one hominid specimen to the extent that it creates a closed, narrow, absorbing, downward system, like that felt when slowly eating chocolate or during genital to-and-fro. Joy also marks a sufficiency of pleasure, but through a non-absorption, a quality of breadth in altitude, an indefinite expansion that makes qualify it as spiritual (spirare); it is a sound range in an almost immobile height that concludes the Ode to Joy (Freude), in the 9th symphony.

Therefore, the anthropogeny will avoid considering liaison affects (pleasure, pleasures, enjoyment, joy) as simple supports of the act. In a being that is physical, technical, semiotic, analogizing, digitalizing, etc., the enjoyment - particularly diffuse enjoyment as global rhythmization of existence - was probably the primary motor and the ultimate end of operations, whether the latter are easy, difficult, almost superhuman, playful or ascetic, selfish or altruistic.

6D2. Pain, sorrow, sadness. Fear, fright, terror, horror

The possibilization of fleeing affects was not less anthropogenic than that of liaison affects. Pain, in its receptors and specialized nervous paths, that we shall not mix up with those of touch, enjoys a much simpler structure than pleasure, because it is an urgent response to urgent threats: severe wounds or physiological unbalances. However, when pain possibilizes, it can also modulate, become subtle, more endotropic and even rhythmic, to give way to suffering (die Leiden), sorrow that the animal already shows. Sadness both reduces and deepens pain, suffering and sorrow, and often is making a system with joy.

There is even a strong regimen of these states, such as fright, terror, horror. Etymology in this case is not very instructive, as it simply sends back to the animal aspects of experience, to the intensified fear for fright (pavere, being frightened, ex, -tare frequentative) to the avoidance by dread in terror (terrere) to the rising of the hair in horror (horror, standing up, trembling). It is perhaps because these reactions are so complex, that they suppose such cerebral orchestrations, that we despair identifying them by another means than through a few exterior traits. So, what we call horror takes place in events where suddenly signs no longer carry out their distanciation work. And this happens in three increasingly radical circumstances. (a) When a hominid specimen loses every coordination due to nervous - particularly cerebral - malfunction. (b) When the situation becomes so insurmountable or strange (foreign) that it can no longer be coordinated; it is Marlon Brando's hollow "Horror!" whispered at the end of the film Apocalypse Now. (c) When, in the thematization that the signification is, all that remains - for one of the two previous reasons - is the pure, empty, evacuating, emptying signification: Sartre's experience of the absurd alleges the emptying hole.

In itself, fleeing affects relative to pain are not rhythmical, unlike the liaison affects relating to pleasure. Sometimes they arise and sometimes they stagnate. However, for technical and semiotic homo, everything is ultimately susceptible of possibilizing elaborations. There will therefore be rhythmic pains, musicalized not only in music but even into everyday gestures.

6E. The natural incarnations of indefinite possibilization

It is highly instructive for the anthropogeny that hominid evolution should have selected three behaviors-conducts in which possibilization realizes itself organically: the smile, laughter, tears. And also that, in all three cases, possibilization realizes itself indefinitely, meaning without quite specific themes, turned to the horizon more than to a circumstance, a situation, a singular thing-performance <1B2>. In other terms, distanciation is here more lively than the distanced themes.

6E1. The smile

Studies by Cheng and Laroche with Pedre-Quadrens signaled in 1965 (Acta Psychologica) and 1966 (Journal de Psychologie normale et pathologique) that in the few hours following birth, "smiles", moderate tensions of certain muscles of the face, concord not only with states of food satiety, but also with REM sleep, which is very considerable in the infant, as well as with first genital erections. The adult smile realizes almost objectless states of possibilization, diluting any particular thing, and therefore without worrying contradiction. Yet REM sleep is an intense moment of the fusional cerebral digestions and genital erections prelude orgastic states, them too of indefinite availability. Therefore, the "smile" of the newborn would precociously testify of the little man being an animal from the distants, who will organize its things-performances-in-situation-in-the-circumstance on the indefinite of a horizon <1B3>. It only takes a few months before the "smile" of the infant - almost a reflex - is transformed into a genuine, intentional smile assuredly miming the smile of the adults taking care of him.

The smile is varied like the possibilization. It can be bitter or triumphant, or a mixture of the two, like the Khmer Buddhas. But its relation with death, supreme availability, is exemplary. "When you will encounter death, you will feel yourself smile. Do not be surprised, it always goes like this", says a Zen precept translated by Malraux. In the last phrase of Buzzati's Il Deserto dei Tartari, Giovanni Dongo dies whilst smiling to no-one. "dà ancora uno sguardo fuori della finestra, una brevissima occhiata, per l'ultima sua porzione di stelle. Poi nel buio <darkness>, benché nessuno lo veda, sorride".

Ethologists have wanted to see a precursory of the smile in the "silent bared-teeth display" of some superior primates, sign of non-hostility, sometimes even submission. But if the smile is silent, it does not denude the teeth and does not imply submission to another, but submission to something that goes beyond the other and oneself.

6E2. Laughter

Laughter comes later than the smile in infants because it supposes the development of the thorax, larynx and pharynx. But it too is possibilizing, and thus characterizes man, insofar as its breathing jolts and bursts of sound make it capable to cancel situations and circumstances that escape social and technical control, such as conflicts between cultures, classes, language and reality, performances and aptitudes, etc. Where the smile surfs, laughter triggers a barrage fire. It is only when it is discreet and rejoins the smile that laughter puts between parenthesis instead of pushing away or becoming the sole focus of attention. This time, the rapprochement of ethologists with the "relaxed open-mouth display" of superior primates seems more pertinent, as this behavior takes part to simulacrum of aggression. However, it does not include the flow of blasts of sound so essential to the burst of laughter.

6E3. Tears

Animals don't cry more than they smile or laugh. And for the same reasons. The tears - slow, liquid, flushing and relatively independent of those who cry - diffuse a situation too urgent in an edgeless area. They literally are melting the person who melts into tears. Some tears are indefinite and infinite like some smiles. In the West, the gift of tears was an attribute of mystics. The Greek legend says that Heraclitus, author of the "panta reï" (everything runs down), cried about everything, just like Democritus, author of the "atomon" (the unbreakable) laughed at everything. At this stage it is clear that the various solubilizations, that smile, laughter and tears are, go hand in hand with the possibilizing Homo's rapid cerebral cleavages, decleavages and recleavages of his brain. These solubilizations both suppose and develop them.

6F. The cultural incarnations of indefinite possibilization

Indefinite possibilization is so essential to Homo that he universally and probably very early on instituted practices where this possibilization could activate-passivate almost in its purest state. The anthropogeny will select the trance for its common character. And suicide for its extremeness.

6F1. Trance

The trance covers apparently opposed, yet coherent states. The word comes from transire (ire, trans, going through); and the English transient shows well that it is question of a both spatial and temporal transition. It targets those behaviors where a hominid specimen creates a there, an elsewhere. And above all an "other". It alienates (alius, other given), or rather alters (alter, other determined).

Trance achieves this by exploiting the states between reverie, dream and awakening - and more topically the resources of falling asleep and coming awake - crossed from rhythms applying to gestures that range from intensified manipulation to dancing, and to catalepsy. The transience of trance can be externalized like an extreme agitation or like an almost mortal immobility (in French and English, "dying" is still known as "passing"). Its vibration then becomes the suspended and almost inaudible breadth of the philosopher that concludes a spiritualist conference, as well as the vociferations of the politicians concluding a meeting. All these states are para-orgastic, or orgastic, such as those accompanying music and bullfight.

The anatomical and physiological vibration of trance aims at being in resonance with some X of another order: forces, spirits, fluids, waves, concepts that are little or not accessible in ordinary use. This type of vibration was probably most extensively made explicit by Asian and north American Shamans. But this curative or illuminative recourse is so native to possibilizing Homo that today many people believe it was already present among the sculptors, engravers, painters of the Upper Paleolithic. A book devoted to the latter bears the title: (Les chamans de la préhistoire - The Shamans of Prehistory).

It is the various natures of these alius and alter X, more or less hidden to the "vulgar" and often also to "the elected", that modulate the trance according to dosages of the choices of existence: bluff/submission, exploration/coquetry, game/seriousness, etc. And also according to categories of possible: the imagined, the impossible, the spontaneous, the necessary, etc. This is covered by the nuanced English semantic of trance, bewilderment, ecstasy, swoon, daze, rapture, torpor. But we shouldn't try too hard to explain each modality of trance using clear purposes. Given the structures and textures of possibilizing Homo, the trance effect has something that suffices itself, is worth by itself, as most open field of possibilizations.

6F2. Suicide

While trance is a collective and primitive hominid state, the extreme possibilization that suicide is, seems to have required a societary and belated state. It supposes a great independence from the group, since it is a question of caedere-sui, of slaughtering, felling, massacring oneself.

Some suicides have a cause, or several causes: escaping unbearable situations or pains; appealing an accusation; taking a revenge for an abandonment by abandoning oneself... But it would be difficult to understand the suicidal impulse that inhabits the hominid specimens if we were to confine it to these relations of means-to-ends. We shall not forget that death, being unthinkable, not referable, is the possible per se, and that the willed death then exercices an essential fascination on many highly possibilizing brains (Valéry). There are suicides of despair and suicides of joy, of narrowing and widening.

However, for the semiotizing animal, even the pure indetermination of death continues through paths determined according to the fundamental fantasies of the group and of each member, and it is therefore semiotically as much as physiologically that suicides are differentiated: by precipitation, defenestration, drowning, strangling, smothering, explosion, penetration, breaking, poisoning, sleep. If one of the late versions of the death of Empedocles supposes that he went to the Etna and threw himself in the crater, it is perhaps that the first sentence of his Purifications (KatHarmoï) ends by "KHaïrete, egô d'Humin Theos ambrotos ouketi tHnètos pôleFmaï meta pâsi tetimenos" "Rejoice, it is as an immortal and non-mortal God that I have walked, honored amongst you all".

The highly interiorizing Romans instituted the glorious suicide of Seneca and the aesthetic suicide of Petronius. And the Eskimo tradition, where old women who no longer have enough teeth to work leather by chewing the skins go off to get lost in the ice floe, shows how easy it is for Homo to die when the means is simple and not painful, such as the mortal cold, and shows that the group perceives itself habitually as a relay of nature amongst the others. In a culture of the intensity like one finds in Japan, suicide went as far as the ceremonial of Hara Kiri.

6G. Possibilized panoplic and protocolar substitutions. Suites and cycles

Speaking of possibilized substitutions is almost a pleonasm, as it is the substitutions that created possibilization. But in the ontogenesis and probably also the phylogenesis, possibilization - once it stood out - will have been broader than substitution, and will have enlarged it in return. To the extent that it is suggestive to speak of substitutive possibilization. Everything pushes Homo towards substitutive possibilization: the distanciation and the lightness of signs, the constant and quick sliding between endotropic and exotropic nervous circulations, the intercerebrality with the socius, the slidings from the semiotic to the technical and from the technical to the semiotic, called magic.

Possibilized substitution is both highly transmuting (by inversions, leaps, slidings), and very regulated (there are no possibles without a field dotted by possibilities, and without rules). So were set up, locally and temporally, suites and cycles of substitution around ingestion, digestion, ejection, excretion, generation; around the phases of the year (seasons) and the day (hours); around alternations between illness and health; hot and cold; wet and dry; present and absent. It is in this area of possibilized protocols and panoplies that three major anthropogenic phenomena were defined: (1) fault and repair; (2) sacrifice, consecration, prohibition; (3) money, or neutral exchanger.

6G1. Fault and repair. Debt

Possibilization profoundly changed the status of error. Animals make mistakes and missteps that are usually repaired in urgency to compensate their drawbacks. Conversely, for possibilizing Homo, error appears in a field of possibles, amongst which there is the non-error, in contrast to which error appears as such. Still, if the error only concerns the specimen that caused it, it has no tomorrow, whether it is repaired or not. But if the error affects the group of belonging (family) or group of contact (clientèle), it can, when it is important, become insistent (sistere, in). Then, its repair is no longer only a matter of choice, it is wished, postulated, demanded, like a possible to be accomplished, and is thus socially evaluated through indicia and indexes.

Then opens a field of speculations (supputation, in French), where it is a question of "putare", meaning cleaning, pruning, clearing, evaluating, "sub", from beneath, and that comparatively. Comparing errors, mistakes, slip-ups will one day be a constant theme of spoken interlocution. Very early on, it must have been a theme of the language by gesture, particularly for the indexations that we have approached and the charge of which transformed the indexed into the troublemaker or scapegoat <5G3>. Therefore, the indexation of the error and the errant changed into blame (culpa), and failing (fall) became guilt (error imputed to someone). The troublemaker-guilty was perceived and moved as cause of the error, put-into-cause, accused (causare, ad). The questioner(s) became accuser(s), from the same root.

Let us specify that, for a very long time, this had to remain exterior, exotropic, without interiorization of the fault and guilt. From the beginnings of Classic Greece, amartaneïn was still simply missing one's target, making a mistake with regard to things or people. Even in Rome, peccatum, from peccare, originally only designates a stumble, a misstep, applicable to animals: "ne equus peccet" (for fear that the horse should stumble).

However, for possibilizing and endotropizing Homo, exotropy is always ready to tip over into endotropy. Peccatum, instead of being imputed to the faulty brain by others, became so by the troublemaker himself, thus divided in accused and accusing, with at the same time a facilitation to play the role of the one and the other <6G4>. The Latin consciencia (scire, cum, knowing with) exemplifies this sliding: at first shared knowledge, then intimate sentiment, then clarity onto oneself, at last grasping of a good and evil proceeding from a self - even an I - conceived as a will that is the source of the fault. The peccatum, misstep that only required a rearranging of the preliminary order, became the Roman-Christian sin, internalized, somewhat Satanic, since it proceeded from a perverse will (vertere, per); the Greek amartas took then the same sense in Christian texts dating back to the first century. With the recent West, this will result in Law (directus, directio, regere, dis) where, to be punishable, the guilty must be recognized as responsible for his actions.

The nature of repair, the etymology of which signals that it is both prospective (parare) and retrospective (re-), has each time been understood according to the status of the fault, and more generally according to the ontology and epistemology of the substitutable possibles practiced by the group. But always supposing that a certain suite, a certain cycle (social and/or natural) had been altered.

6G2. Sacrifice, consecration, prohibition. Cast versus class. Forgiveness

It is in the perception of these suites and cycles that sacrifice is situated. Fundamentally, sacrifice ensures their repair or simply their continuation in a *woruld where unbalance, even when it is not actual, is at least virtual, virtual insofar as it is a field of possibilized substitutions or substitutive possibles. The ressource of the priests (sacrificer) is of the same nature as what they conjure, i.e. the substitutability. Into very regulated and highly transmutable substitutions, like the possibles that must be handled, manipulated <1A1>.

The area of sacrificial substitutions then has mostly comprised: (a) food, with hunting (rearing) and gathering (culture); (b) health, illness, death, with hot and cold, dry and humid; (c) the in-group (we-group) and the out-group; (d) the here and there: (e) the now and other times; (f) the absence and presence; (g) the right and the left (curve). Here everything circulates, in each series-cycle, and between the series-cycles. Eating is inevitably destroying some living, some "Kamo" said Leenhardt's Melanesians. Which means, for Homo with transversalizing body and neutralizing brain, to produce unbalance at the same time as balance. The same goes for the healthy and the ill. The living and the dead. For the ancient Mayas, the word quiche Puz (*Pu) seems to designate both sacrifice and magical force, when it comes to human sacrifices, intended to maintain the strength of the gods.

Therefore, innumerable substitutions of segments of the *woruld, reparative and conservative, were put in place, completed or at least comforted by spoken segments. Local and daily substitutions in family sacrifices. Cosmological substitutions, sometimes in "great years", in tribal sacrifices. With clannish sacrifices between both.

It is around the sacrifice thus understood - certainly very archaic - that the "rite" became clearer. It would seem that the Hittites (circa -1500), the influence of whom on Greece is starting to be measured, expressed the rite by the word saklaïs, from the same root as the Latin sacrum, from which comes (a) sacrificium, accomplishing the sacred (sacrum, facere) and proceeding by those substitutions which are death, mutilation, self-mutilation, simple loss or libation and (b) the consecretio (sacrare, cum, converting in the area of the sacred) proceeding by a deviation of the ordinary circuit, like for anachoretism (hermits) and virginity. In any case, one of the keys of any anthropogeny is given in the distinction between animal ritualization - a fortuitous addition of secondary behaviors to a main behavior of which they thus become obliged annunciators and precursors <4A> - and the hominid rite which supposes possibilization.

The indicialities and indexations made then that sacrifices took a thousand forms. From the continual and almost furtive immolation of cocks in Griaule's Dogons right up to the solemn immolation of the king-priest in Africa when he had lost his strength, seeing that the life of his people supposed his vitality, according to James Frazer's interpretation of "divine kingship". Also varying from the human sacrifices of the enemy (Pre-Columbian Mesoamerica) or of the friend (Iphigenia) right up to those of the hundred beef of the Greek-Roman hecatomb, or the body of Christ consumed abstractly by Christians under the transubstantiated bread and wine. Sometimes simple Lents and Ramadans. But always under the polarities of the exchange, its regularities and reinstatements. Topological poles: separating what is too confounded, linking what is too separated; or still, distinguishing the close and bringing closer the contrary. Cybernetic poles: maintaining into circulation and ensuring feedback, at the crossroad of allostasis and homoeostasis, of cold and hot, of straight and odd. Temporal poles: crossing future and past. The Roman hostia (hostire, hitting) was expiatory and propitiatory (petere, pro), even divinatory.

The nature of the sacrifice gave birth to its instruments, which are as panoplic and varied as it is, even though the knife, trait-point (mathematics, logic), eminently indexating, separating and distributing, remains its paragon, seeing that, for the segmentarizing Homo, there is no sacrificial exchange without segment (secare). And also because blood, that the knife often spills, is, with the consecratory speech, the sacrificial flow per se. These flows are, for example, the quiq (blood) of the Popol Vuh and the circulations between word and blood among Griaule's Dogons.

And at the same time as being a (re)balancing instrument, sacrifice was also a powerful speculative motor, stirring up in particular animal and vegetable systematics. Never has one sacrificed just anything. A victim must be indicially pregnant and indexically salient. And this according to the rite, which, as we have seen, often comprises opposing couples. These speculations produced and comforted the general couples: important/less important, exceptional/trivial, natural/supernatural, cosmologically efficient/episodic, allowed/prohibited, sacred/profane, present/absent, etc.

The most striking case of sacralizing delimitation was the temple in the wide sense: Paleolitic Shamanistic cave, Neolithic rectangle, Indian Hypogeum, Greek Naos, Etruscan-Roman templum (from where our "contemplate" comes), sacrificial pyramids of Teotihuacan... so many places where, before any other choice, the delimitation as such was exercised as such, limit (limes), term (terminus) of a place and an era, according to strict and constant rules, a place which by its very indexing charge makes that what is outside becomes vulgar (vulgus, everyday people) and that what is inside seems reserved, chaste (castus); an asylum where pillage cannot take place, and where the criminals sometimes cannot be pursued (asylum, a- privative, sulân, pillaging). From where the false but suggestive etymology which, before the discovery of the Hittite word saklaïs, brought together sacrum and se-cernere, putting aside.

Prohibition, particularly that of incest, where Homo, now a structuralist, will one day want to see his foundation, is not less striking than the temple is. For Upper primates, hierarchical distribution barred coitus between the mother and her male progeny. In Homo, the barrage became prohibition, provoking the non-chaste (in-cest), the non-private (castus, deprived of), both of which transgressing (gredi, trans) the lineage of the caste (chaste). In the case of the scapegoat, it was indexation that created the saliency and pregnancy of the thing-performance elected as guilty. In the prohibition (of incest), it is the barrage that had become interdict (dicere inter) that creates the saliency and pregnancy of the "back of the mother" (Quran).

Just like the interdiction (dicere, inter) <5G2>, prohibition slid from its positive sense (habere, pro) to a negative sense, in a new verification of the salience of negation under affirmation, confirmed in segmentarizing and macro-digitalizing Homo. And in the ambivalence between approved/reproved inherent to any indexation. Similarly, imprecation, which etymologically is only a prayer to whish something to someone (precari, in), was soon understood negatively.

The words of Christian consecration, which have crossed two millennia, summarize many aspects of the sacrifice, even more sensitive in Latin. "Here (ecce) is the chalice of my blood, the blood of the Alliance (testamentum), ancient and new, which will be spilled (effundetur) for you and for the multitude (pro vobis and pro multis) in remission (in remissionem) of sins (peccatum, with its various senses). Do this in memory of me." Almost everything is in there. Blood as the basal circulator. The invocation of regulated suites and cycles, in two testaments. The effusion or libation. The fault having become debt and its referral (missio, re-) into another sphere. The relation to death. The prevalent role of indexation (hic est enim). The memory and the project (the testament is old and new), expiation and propitiation, as in the etymology of reparation. The exit from a series-cycle and entry into another by assimilation (take and eat) to a mutated element (wine>>blood).

In this chapter on possibilization, we insisted on the substitutive, thus delimitative, aspect of the sacrifice. But there is also a fusional aspect to which we shall come back when we approach the perceptive-motor and logico-semiotic field effects, and which will bring us to set apart sacrificial fantasies amongst fantasies <7I7>. It is wise to keep in mind the range of sacrifices to understand the range of pardons (donare, per, to give thoroughly), going from the negotiated pardon (conditional) to the grand pardon (unconditional), which is not unrelated with sanctity <27D3a>.

6G3. The neutral exchanger. Monies/money. Freedom of choice

Since our chapters on indicia and indexes, we have encountered an impressive number of exchangeables: tools, goods, skills, grades, instances, clientèle, so many merchandises in the wide sense (merx, exchangeable), so many objects of commerce (commercium, merces, cum). To which we can now add the highly constraining flows-cuts of sacrificial victims <6G2>. In the end, the innumerable substitutive possibilizations of Homo point together to a stable referent that allows disparate exchanged to be compared rather precisely. In short, they point to a neutral exchanger.

The neutral exchanger, that we today call money or currency, first took shape in natural objects, such as the African cowrie shell (Monetaria moneta). This Indian Ocean gastropod was sufficiently indicial of fecundity to stimulate the exchange, and was dead enough to index neutrality. But we shall have to wait for the abstraction of the counting tokens of the Neolithic and mainly the abstraction of writing, counting victories, prisoners, sacrifices, merchandises of the Primary empires of Sumer and Egypt before the neutrality of the exchanger declared itself. It then took only a few centuries before, always more abstractly, the ingot should have its equivalent in coins, letters of credit, bank notes, credit and debit columns, in digits simply preceded by "+" or "-", in a few 0/1 bits on central computers. Anyway, naturalness did not completely disappear in carnal Homo: neither in the gold standard until the Bretton Woods system; nor in the cut or uncut diamonds that the Jews exchange from pocket to pocket in New York or Antwerp, without written documents, on a pure indicia-index of word, and the value of which is both supranational and subject to indefinite interpretations.

In all cases, measured to the neutral exchanger, the commercial exchanged could become merchandises in the strict sense, themes of exact exchanges, measurable, independent from the desires of partners. Fault itself appeared like a debt, and its repair or remission could depend on a reimbursement.

Does the link between the fault, the sacrifice, death, the neutral exchanger then depend of something more essential than their simple common belonging to the area of regulated exchangeability? Let us recall that the Latin word for money comes from Moneta, the temple of Juno moneta, Juno monitrice (monere, to announce), so called because she had foretold an earthquake. But, is this a simple metonymy designating the thing by its place of production or storage? First, let us not forget, that Juno was the sister and the wife of Jupiter. She was a particularly femininely marked goddess of parturition. Secondly, let’s not forget either that it is the same Indo-European root of childbirth *tHè (fe) that gave fe-nus in Latin (revenue of a capital), fe-cunditas (fecundity), fe-mina (woman), and in Greek, with the initial childlike redoubling, ti-tHè-nè (the nurse). So that, the links of the sacred, the neutral exchanger and the generation (life and death) do not seem fortuitous.

The community of root of fe-nus and fe-mina is the occasion to remark that women, mobile elements in various clannish systems, were often a stabilizing theme of the exchange and money for Homo. In African pastoral people, the cattle is not primarily the sign and means of sufficiency of food, nor the result of a research of productivity, or a direct manifestation of power, but it is the manner of acquiring women against which it is exchanged. The woman as supreme term of inter-clannish exchange probably marks the ultimate acquaintances of the possibilized exchange with generation, life and death.

Indeed, death sheds light on sacrifice, that in turn sheds light on death; both being lighted from the neutrality of the neutral exchanger. Death is a moment of radical cancellation and abstraction (unthinkable, that cannot be weighed), a substitution where there is no longer an exchangeable against another, but an infinite opening and exchangeability by dint of being empty or unspeakable (decomposition). The neutral exchanger shows its mortifying, sacrificial, abstraction in the nil spendings of avarice or the extravagant spendings of prodigality, as well as in the existential vertigo of the player.

The both generalized and adaptable exchangeability of all of Homo's aspects around the neutral exchanger was strongly illustrated in the system of Christian indulgences, where money could be bought and sold against sins, penitences, pardons, present and future salvation. It is remarkable that the fervent starting point of this system took place in the twelfth century in the first moment of co-creative Catholicism which, thanks to a first influx of monies, would lead to the banking system, which makes the past, present and future interchangeable, inducing the idea of freedom of choice <30H>.

6G4. Inversion and delegation of roles

The exchange reaches its most radical form in the substitution of roles, particularly in that of the dominating and dominated. Childhood games illustrate the extent to which the ones usually want to be dominating and the others dominated, but also how domination and submission can be inverted, delegated, and participate to each other easily and richly. In the childish game of torture, the torturer of one day becomes a scrupulous and imaginative victim the next, whilst yesterday's victims become equally imaginative torturers. If we do not perceive this quality for everyone, while standing on one side of the fence, to always be on both sides at the same time, we cannot understand anything of the simultaneously stable and flexible organization of hominid societies with their extreme forms, which are democracy (direct and indirect), oligarchy, dictatorship, all of which are ordinarily as consented as they are imposed, in the same way as antique slavery. Assuredly, substitutions and delegations of roles due to the possibilizing transversalization and endotropic brain of Homo are only so available as they are because the indexes of power and indexes in general <5>, so closely articulate the yes and the no, the same and the other. And indicia even more so. <4>.

6H. The will as possibilized ends and means. Ordinary madness

Apart from the fact that possibilization can make change the means of an end, and the ends of a means, it is still apt to revert their order, considering the end first, and going back (descending) the means from the last to the first. In this reversal of "means and ends" into "ends and means", the ends become projects, in the own sense of "thrown in front" (jacere, pro).

Such is the basis of the technical and semiotic willing of Homo. It took the western world to hypostatize the willing in a will, which was itself hypostatized in a responsible, voluntary subject. But a minimum of willing is linked to the cerebral structure of possibilizing Homo. Homo devotes this willing to a certain will for power, according to the liaison of Latin verbs posse, potere, pollere. And even, since the possibilization is itself indefinite, to a certain all-powerfulness that, since it escapes de facto, tends to project itself into gods or God, de jure.

If we call madness a state where hominid specimens use and enjoy their endotropic nervous circulations with little reference to the objectifying demands of exotropic nervous circulations, except for the conditions of survival, we shall add that the will for power defines an ordinary madness in Homo. This ordinary madness specifically concerns the exchange and often culminates on the occasion of the neutral exchanger, money, monies, insofar as it is the most obvious instrument of pure possibilization. The philosophical ramblings, omnipresent in Homo, are another constant form of this ordinary madness. Later on, on the occasion of Homo's illnesses <26B>, we shall approach pathological madness, which is frequent but not ordinary.

Henri Van Lier

Translated by Paula Cook, 2017

(Last update, December 11, 2024)