When we approached the brain in the second chapter, we noted the strange phenomenon of presence which at times accompanies, if not its own operations - which are mute - at least some of the things, performances, physiological states, technical objects and signs that it treats. We even thought that we could indicate some of the physical or physiological "intimacies" that seemed to go hand in hand, or even underlie this phenomenon of presence in the bio-electric-chemical computer, that a brain is <2A6>.

We understand that, in this case, we cannot simply say that something is there, by opposition to not being there, or having gone, or does not exist, but that "presence" aims at the apparition, the apparitionality, the phenomenality, the presentiality of what is there. This is the sense that the word has in the title of Lavelle's 1938 work, La présence totale, with connotations that would embarrass us here, and that it has quite purely in Sartre's 1943 Being and Nothingness, particularly in II, ch.3, I-II-III, where the word presence appears dozens of times in the sense that we understand it, i.e. apparitionality, phenomenality, presentiality.

Homo always felt that presence understood in this way was common to himself and the animal, which is something that Shamans and Totemism primitively and eminently testify. But the animal does not seem to thematize this dimension of the Real, in the same way as it does not thematize its modes of existence <6> and field effects <7>. In contrast, many hominid conducts are not only accompanied with presence, but take it as their theme and as their goal, their source of pleasure and their object of desire.

8A. Presence versus functionings. Non-describable de jure. An occasionalism. Presence(s)-Absence(s). The physical/metaphysical distinction. The metaphysical animal

What can we say about presence? That, even if it is assuredly associated to functionings, it is not a functioning; it even constitutes a certain real that opposes to functionings. Taken in its maximum extent, the term "functioning" encompasses every action, reaction and passion of the Universe insofar as for each one we can find antecedents and consequences, and refer if not coordinate the ones with the others. Therefore, amongst perceptive-motor field effects, we thought good to make the distinction between <7G> those that are calculables, if not de facto, at least de jure, like static, kinetic, dynamic field effects and those that are not calculable de facto or de jure, like excitable field effects. But all of them, even the latter, seemed to us to be describable, graspable, if not in rigorously quantifiable coordinates, at least referable among topological, cybernetic, logico-semiotic, and presentive referentials. And these distinctions, between calculable and non-calculable, also seemed valid in the case of logico-semiotic field effects.

Yet presence (presentiality, apparitionality, phenomenality) not only escapes to every de facto and de jure calculation, but it has never been referred by anyone. No one ever proposed a referential for it. Its only pertinent determination consists in being, being a real, and yet not being a functioning. Presence is indescribable, in contrast to the known or unknown functionings that can all be described. It is probably why it was never considered by any traditional philosopher, including Parmenides, Plato, Aristotle, Hegel, Husserl, Heidegger, Lao Tzu, or Sakkara. When Wittgenstein talks about presence in his 1921 Tractatus, he concludes in his last aphorism that "we must silence what we cannot speak of", after having said, however, that we could "show" something of presence in a choice that he calls "mystical". And when Sartre, in 1943 Being and Nothingness, has the philosophical glory of considering presence frontally for the first time and to question its being (its fabric of being), - in an ontology of phenomenality, apparitionality, - he places it on the side of "non-substance", of a certain "nothingness", of a "nihilation", of a "decompression of the being".

As presence-apparition is not describable or coordonable, its relation to the functionings it accompanies is not either. However, a relation must exist. As this relation could not be an efficient, final, formal, material, or instrumental causality - in which case it would be coordonable, or at least describable – and as, on the other hand, we cannot explain it by resonances or phasings, which would only be more concealed causalities, let us simply say that presence (presentiality, apparitionality) takes place "on the occasion" of some cerebral functionings. The word "occasion" here refers to a minimal concomitance, since its etymology only evokes a fall (cadere) across (ob), spatially and temporally.

To which we should probably add that presence maintains a very tight link with absence. To the extent that we could, like many of our contemporaries, target a presence-absence, by well understanding that in this case it is not a question of the absence of something or someone, but of the indescribability and indeterminability of presence. We must then still determine whether absence-presence should be used in the plural or singular form. As it takes place on the occasion of some cerebral functionings that have a beginning and an end, we may conceive that a new presence-absence corresponds to each new or renewed functioning, and that there are therefore presences-absences in the plural form. Likewise, as presence-absence can take place through a brain or through another, we can think that in one case it is mine, and in another case it is yours or hers, according to a new plurality: our presences-absences. On the other end, if we are sensitive to the independence of presence, absence, presence-absence in relation to the functionings they accompany, we are tempted to conceive them as being independent from the plural linked to the here/there, now/not now, existing/non-existing, and also to mine, yours, his/hers, by always writing presence-absence. Homo's civilizations have shown every sort of choices in this regard, through the privilege granted to one of these two terms or through the equivalence of the two. It is probably useful that an anthropogeny should sometimes write presence(s)-absence(s) to signal this game.

We shall conclude with the essential philosophical declaration: In the Universe, there are only functionings (describable) and presences (indescribable). The distinction between functionings/presence(s)-absence(s) is the original distinction. This distinction can also be expressed by the qualifications physical/metaphysical. In this case, is physical (pHusika) all that concerns growths, regardless of what they are, inanimate or animated, organic or mental (pHueïn, growing), which growths can be coordinated or at least described. And is metaphysical all that comes after physics (meta-ta-pHusika), what remains when we have envisaged the entire field of physics-chemistry-biology in its widest sense and which, in our primordial distinction, can therefore only be the presence(s)-absence(s), apparitionality, which could not be described, but only pointed out.

It is true that in the introducer of the word "metaphysical", Aristotle, and later in the western philosophy, the word has had all sorts of derivative senses, linked to the paradigms of the era, and - for example - has designated a science that would focus on the ordering principle of the Universe, to which where conferred, apart from existence, powers and attributes of primary efficient cause and last final cause, sometimes called God, infinite being, realissime being, etc. But if we stick to the first sense of "what comes from beneath or beyond physics", metaphysics comfortably designates what is not physical, therefore what is not describable, i.e., in our primordial distinction, the presence(s)-absence(s). And as this distinction plays a constant role not only in religions but also in art, love and all hominid actions and passions, the physical/metaphysical couple, taken in this etymological sense, lends itself to soberly express that Homo, in addition to being a transversalizing, orthogonalizing, possibilizing, indexating, etc. being, is also a metaphysical animal, therefore capable of thematizing presence(s)-absence(s) indescribably accompanying some of its functionings and to make it a theme of his desire, or even the essential theme of desire.

The physical/metaphysical couple thus understood also has the advantage of making a clear distinction between physical presence (the fact of being there in contact or under the eyes) and metaphysical presence (the presentiality, the phenomenality suggested on this occasion). This allows expressing conveniently rather subtle things, such as for instance the fact that, in some forms of theatre and dance, a metaphysical presence is targeted through physical presences. We think here to the acting of Beckett's actors.

8B. Range of functionings with regard to presence and "conscience"

If it is true that presence, absence, presence-absence are in an "occasionalist" relation with certain functionings of the Universe, we must expect a panoply of rates in the functioning/presence couple, for example non-presential, pene-presential, para-presential, etc. The distribution of these rates is so much linked to Homo's overall structure that, despite the differences in eras and cultures, the basic range of them is rather similar everywhere. An anthropogeny must at least provide one version of this range.

Yet a preliminary point. The functionings/presence distinction is foreign to the western reader because it is dissimulated for them by the much more familiar notion of conscience, in which presence (apparitionality) and knowledge (functionings) are more or less linked, added, confounded. Romans, highly syntactic Indo-Europeans, in whom the most intense experiences of presence were those that accompanied knowledge, invented the term conscientia. Hence the compound con-scientia, where cum is an intensive that is simultaneously collective, reflected, respectful ("moral consciousness") of knowledge. Thus, with Christianity, conscientia could increasingly designate the internalizing grasp. Having become conscience, it will name, for Malebranche, the "interior sentiment" which allows knowing a few "properties of the soul". And, for Locke, where it is translated as consciousness, it will name an act of memory (as suggested by the German mind-meinen) creating a "representation of things from the past allowing for the definition of an I". Finally, since Hamilton, consciousness and conscience, and German counterpart Bewusstsein, acquired approximately the current sense of the word, where con-scientia = knowledge + presence.

As we can see, the word conscience (Bewusstsein) is much too vague to serve as a theoretical concept in an anthropogeny. Apart from the fact that it blurs the distinction functioning/presence, it leads some Latins, such as Sartre, to believe that by speaking confusedly of presence and conscience without articulating them, one can be exempted to envisage the mental and cerebral functionings that support every knowledge. Conversely, it leads some Anglo-Saxons, including physicist Penrose and cognitive psychologist Damasio, to believe that it suffices, in order to "explain" presence, to explain the mental and cerebral functionings that come with it. However, historically, it would be too frustrating for Westerners to exclude every allusion to eastern "consciousness" from the range of the functionings/presence relationships. We will therefore indicate some of the possible parallelisms between functionings/presence and consciousness, by using the sign /// to mark their fragile character.

8B1. Non-presentials

First, there is the huge area of functionings that escapes every presence-apparitionality-phenomenality, even though they take place in organisms with a brain. It is for instance the case for cellular transformations, deep sleep, some phases of digestion, but also the operations of the neurons and synapses of the brain even when awake, and the constructive or eliminatory work of memorization <2A5>, according to the "silence" of the nervous support <2A7>. Such is the basal state for every living being with a brain, as it is a state-moment of Universe. That state-moment that Saint Anthony of Flaubert was looking for when he found beatifying to identify himself with the stones of his desert. (/// "strictly unconscious".)

8B2. Pene-presentials

Then there are functionings that are presential, but hardly. Such as food satiety and the first digestion, the falling asleep, the moment when one half-awakes. And several states of semi-lucidity. (/// "Half-consciousness"

8B3. Para-presentials

Sleep, as it digests the traumas - especially those of the previous day - through its intensified memoration <2A5, 2B5>, already signaled the traumatic character of many perceptions, even apparently banal. On the other hand, the brain has little to gain by charging too many non-urgent information onto its paths of perception-motivity, or onto those of its adjoining memories. For these two first reasons already, many memorization and, above all, memoration functionings remain usually non-presential, whilst being cerebrally sufficiently active to become conveniently presential in case of need, at short, medium and long term. These kinds of memorization and memoration functionings are, for example, many motives for decisions, or the implications of dreams, which many peoples attempted to transform into premonition. (/// "Pre-consciousness, Vorbewusste".)

8B4. Pre-presentials

In a given hominid group, certain cerebral functionings result so basally from social or language structures of the community or society, and they go so much without saying that it is almost impossible for anyone to relativize them, to grasp them in distanciation or simply to see them. The "pre-" in "pre-presential" is then similar to that of "pre-liminary", "pre-judged", "pre-supposed", "pre-existing". This groupal upstream of any singular functioning is already sensitive in the manner in which a specimen deciphers indicia and produces indexes. But it is more powerfully active in the everyday neutral language, which is spoken literally inside its speaker before and as s/he speaks it. (/// Freud's "Uber-Ich, Super-Ego".)

8B5. Central presentials

In the recent Western world, Homo is often convinced that the state of full attention (awakening) is its authentic state and that all others are no more than preparations, expectations, peripheral resonances, repressions. The anthropogeny must not, however, be under any illusion on the centrality and importance of presential functionings, which are always made up of an alternation of awakenings, distractions and cancellations. In a-wake and a-ware, the English prefix "a-" marks a state that goes towards vigilance but at the cost of a work of Sisyphus. (/// The "conscient, conscious, bewusst, strictly speaking".)

8B6. Reflected presentials

The perception-motricity-perception circuit of endotropic and distantiating Homo may sometimes stop going forward and come back to one of its stages for a moment. For example, to remove a physical or mental obstacle. To adapt the sequence of the thing-performance to a situation, to a circumstance, to a horizon <1B3>. To break down the distinct stages of the situation and the elements of the circumstance. To re-find in the pene-presential, para-presential, pre-presential functionings those that are susceptible of influencing the current situation and circumstance, etc. The "re" prefix applied to ”flection” [in re-flection] clearly suggests the returns we are referring to. The mobilization inherent to reflective cerebral functionings means that they are ordinarily more presential than merely attentive functionings. (/// "Reflected consciousness", which does not have an equivalent for Freud, whose index general, at Reflectionen, only refers to Grübeln, digging one's head.)

8B7. Reflexive presentials

Reflexivity, on the other hand, is a reduplication (plicare, duo, re) where functionings come back onto themselves, not to examine their adequacy to experiences, which is the task of reflection, but to identify in themselves the conditions of every full experience, and thus also the presence to oneself. It is even those functionings that question speculatively presence as such. They were thematized very late in the anthropogeny. But at the same time, they are so involved in the logical virtuosity and humor that, seeing how these latter activate-passivate from early childhood, we are entitled to wonder if a certain reflexivity did not exert itself relatively early in the gestures or in the words of the techno-semiotic primate. (/// Maine de Biran's "reflective conscious", introduced almost at the same time as the Hamilton’s consciousness added a speculative dimension and also one of presence-apparitionality that the Latin conscientia did not have.)

8B8. Counter-presentials

Sometimes, some of the functionings that we have just seen become incompatible between them, or are crossed by others, particularly by pre-presential functionings. The brain, since it is a crossing place of informational construction and constructive information <2A1>, cleaves them, conferring them the status of constantly para-presential functionings <8B3>. During memoration, these functionings - kept apart - diffuse nevertheless (themselves) amongst the others, (a) sometimes composing compromises with them (Freudian symptoms), (b) sometimes charging themselves explosively with field effects to the point that they create compulsional fantasies <7I6>, (c) or sometimes provoking non-situatable and non-reconstructible unbalances, which psychotherapies have always attempted to put back into a circuit. (/// Freud's "Unbewusst". The latter is supposed to result from a repression, "Verdrängung". But outside the bourgeois central Europe of the 1900s, counter-presential functionings are probably often the result of a less dramatic cerebral hygiene.)

8B9. Presentive presentials

Finally, some functionings are there for the concerted thematization of presence-absence. They occupy a considerable place and perhaps a preponderant place in hominid existence, giving way to specialized "lives", such as extreme art, mysticism, love, but also traversing everyday life, such as Café’s life. We will broach them in the following paragraph under the name of presentification. (/// Few Western counterparts and no Freudian counterpart.)

8C. Presentification conducts. Peak Experiences

In all populations known to us, hominid specimens have cultivated presentive or presentifying conducts, i.e. conducts where presence or presence-absence was expected and maintained. Actively, passively, tangentially. In any case, by rejecting by ruse the circuit of techno-semiotic means and ends, characteristic of functionings. We encountered these experiences on the occasion of excited field effects, but we must come back to these under the light that the primary distinction functioning/presence now proposes.

Three main paths are offered to thematize presence-absence. (a) Overexciting functionings, particularly excited field effects, until they either implode or explode. (b) Conversely, to unravel functionings until the order of means and ends blurs in the vagueness of meditation and consideration <6A>. (c) To move within the order of functionings without stopping to be available to the passivity that accompanies some of them. The middle voice of the Greek and Latin verbs sometimes approached this attitude.

Assuredly, certain circumstances-on-a-horizon make things-performances-in-situation presentifying. Certain times of the day: the clear night, nightfall, noonday, and the early morning. Certain places: the desert, the river, the steppe, and the great north. Some seasons: Easter, ruts and heat.

But Homo did not content with waiting for these random coincidences, and he usually has put in place cyclical rituals allowing to hope for the emergence of presence-absence regularly. These were the fighting to death, the duel (Stendhal’s duel described by Merimée), the crime (according to Genet), the extenuating dancing, the fasting, the prolonged immobility, the orgy, the maintained divagation, the pilgrimage with its fatigue and disorientation. In more intellectualist cultures, the same finality produced paintings, architectures, extreme art music <11I3, 27D1>, and also some political "great nights". Assuredly, presentifications are maintained by the eight properties of rhythm <1A5> and especially their excited field effects. Often too, they are helped by drugs that work on neurotransmitters directly.

Presentifications are not aberrations or exceptions of the anthropogeny. In the sixties [1960s], American psychologist Maslow imagined an ingenious protocol to show their triviality. He asked some students in his university to designate those who seemed especially "balanced", "healthy" and "normal". Once he had the list, he interrogated the elected. They all confided that they practiced extreme sports, extreme mountain climbing, extreme art, anticipated death, extreme love, scientific or mathematical insight, heroism, mystical rapt, various passions, all cases where functionings are not limited to their production, but are the occasion to thematize presence-absence. On this subject, Maslow spoke of peak-experiences. He could also have used the term "bottom experiences" or, referring to Baudelaire, used the expression "anywhere out of the world experiences". Most of Maslow's students probably never had noticed that they were practicing peak or depth experiences before taking part to the study. Like the laborer who, after work, goes to have a drink in his favorite seat in his favorite pub, either keeping silent or speaking about anything to anyone. Like the adolescents and adults that "erupt" in nightclubs on Saturday night.

Phylogenetically, experiences of these types probably played a role in the passage from Homo habilis to Homo erectus, then to Homo sapiens and Sapiens sapiens. Ontogenetically, they take place according to the contrasted ages of hominid specimens <3C>, during the initiations of adolescence, of marriage, the renouncement of old age, funerals. They can have the force of a cataclysm at the end of childhood. Sartre described the brisk fulguration of the undifferentiated pure exist in a little girl looking at the sea from the deck of a ship.

8D. Ideations of presence-absence. The absolutes: eternity-immortality, ubiquity-infinity, spontaneity-almighty-power. Strong versus weak freedom

To the approach of presentification, which "raises" functionings to presence-absence, the anthropogeny will couple the inverted movement by which technician and semiotic Homo constantly tries to make presence-absence enter into the order of functionings, by conceptualizing it <2B2>. And also - because presence-absence is subject to appetite, pleasure, desire - by magnifying it into regulating ideas, following the sliding by which idea gave ideal. We find such ideations in all cultures. We are reduced here to express them in our western words, and even our French-English words, by entrusting the readers to follow the equivalent terms with other nuances elsewhere.

(1) Eternity. Immortality. - The idea of eternity offers a good start. A sensation, a perception, an indiciality, an indexation, a possible, a pain, insofar as presence-absence is thematized in it, tends to escape time and to belong to a sort of "any-time-always-never". This is what was targeted in age as a time of life (aetas), from the Indian-European root *aye that we find in the Greek aïôn, the Latin aevum (pronounce aïFoum), the old English *â (aye), a root still active today under the forms aeternum, aeternitas. Eternity thus perceived contributed to confer various immortalities to those who were supposed to be inhabited by it, whether human or animal. It accomplishes at best in the tense of the verb that was precisely called the "present" (prae-esse, being-before), encouraging the relation between eternity and praesentia.

(2) Ubiquity. Infinity - An absolute domination of the present goes hand in hand with an indefinity in space, according to the sentiment that then my present must also be the present of other events everywhere else, right to the end of the Universe. There would therefore be in the Universe events whose present corresponds to my present, according to a concrete duration, of which Homo defended the originality against the relativist physical time when the latter was postulated (see the Bergson-Einstein correspondence). The term ubiquity (ubi, there where, -que, enclitic of generalization) rather well fits this sentiment that, joined to eternity, has diversely supported the idea of spatial infinity.

(3) Spontaneity. Almighty power - Insofar as it escapes the order of causality, presence-absence, when it is projected in the order of functionings, bears the idea of a pure spontaneity (spons, source). Hence an ideal of freedom, on which we can find the prodromes elsewhere, but that culminated in the end of the West. For Sartre for example, in around 1945, no exterior or interior event could act on a "conscience", a "freedom", which conversely had the power of intervening in the order of things. The idea of freedom is at the principle of the idea of almighty power, in a kind of temporal infinity. (Calling this freedom "strong freedom" allows to distinguish it clearly from the "degrees of freedom", or "dimensions" of a system, that we can call "weak freedom".)

Contrary to conducts of presentification, that seem to have appeared very early, the three major ideations of the presence-absence - eternity, ubiquity, spontaneity - appeared very late in the anthropogeny, hardly before Taoism, Buddhism, Pythagoreanism, Christianity and modern rationalism. Nevertheless, in a hominid brain, the reciprocal implication of conducts and ideas is such that presentifying conducts must from the start had to comprise virtually some ideations of presence-absence, and that in turn these ideations have always continued to feed from presentifying conducts. To the extent that the regulating ideas that we have kept are often nothing more than presentifying conducts, more or less purified (discharged, abstract) and variously grouped in beams of indexes.

The three absolutes (non-bound, solvere, ab) of eternity (immortality), ubiquity (infinity), spontaneity (strong freedom) have been conceived as more objectal or more subjectal, more substantialized or more qualitative, more relative or more absolute, depending on the areas and moments of culture. In any case, we shall be careful not to confuse them with the divine, which etymologically would relate them too much to a luminous Indo-European absolute (*diF, dies, deus, Zeus, divus): Hoc sublime candens quem omnes invocant Jovem. And even less so with the sacred, which relates to a generalized compensatory exchange, in which these regulating ideas only intervene as exchangeables like the others. This does not exclude that they often shared qualities with the divine, and with the sacred.

8E. Real and Desire

The primary distinction functionings/presence-absence with its procession of presentifications and regulating ideas invites to insist on the semantic distinction that the French allows between Reality and Real, need and desire.

8E1. Real versus Reality

Reality, a word ending in -ity, which rings more familiar (like "possibility") designates all that, in the Universe, hominid specimens can regrasp, assume, understand, describe and handle in their current or future technical and semiotic systems. For each of us, Reality results from technical and social consistencies that mutually determine each other. Such is also the German Realität, in Freud’s sense. According to the initial articulation functionings/presence, Reality covers everything that belongs to functionings, from atoms to distant galaxies and quarks, right up to logical paradoxes. Correlatively, Real, a word that sounds more absolute, is apt to designate what Homo cannot and will never be able to regrasp in his systems, what cannot be described, i.e. presence-absence. And as such participates from Real what intensely involves presence-absence, what is strongly presential, and that can be said presentifying, such as artistic, mystical, love experiences.

Along the same lines, some may be tempted to make uncoordinable functionings (de jure or simply de facto) enter into the Real. This is the case with insights where a mathematician begins to suspect that the form of one of his equations expresses a much wider structure that he may never know; it is the case also with the paradoxical beginning of the big bang for the physicist; or with logical paradoxes and limits of formalism; with excited field effects insofar as they are uncoordinable; with sexual and generalized partition-conjunction insofar as it precisely exploits many excited field effects and that its combination of minimal duality and of open unity puts ordinary logics uncomfortable; with ideas or ideations of eternity, ubiquity, spontaneity. But in its own interest the anthropogeny will resist approximations. And it will be convenient for it to reserve Real (versus Reality) to presence-absence, and to the hominid experiences that imply it, when they are envisaged as implying it.

8E2. Desire versus need

The Reality/Real distinction allows to clarify the need/desire distinction. The phenomenology of desire is familiar to hominid specimens from all cultures. It is a quest, but directed to an inaccessible object, more or less indefinable, and that in any case escapes, even when it is re-joined or possessed. Desire encompasses a sort of spatial-temporal elongation of the questor, that the Kluge dictionary considers to be sensitive to the German speaker in langen and erlangen, and that also is sensitive to English speakers in longing to.

The Latins who invented the words desiderare and desiderium marked these aspects from the outset, by comparing the objects of desire with sidera (stars) and by rendering the relation that it maintains with them by de- (from) [de-siderare, from-star]. Moreover, under the influence of Roman-Christian interiority, desiderare aliquid (to desire something) evolved into desiderare ad aliquid (to desire towards something) in Augustine (sicut cervus desiderat ad fontes aquarum, sic desiderat anima mea ad te, Domine). The French aspirer à shows the same sliding, by privileging in the desire the volatility of the breath (spirare) with the movement (ad).

In the Reality/Real couple, desire then is linked to Real, i.e. presence-absence, but also to everything it usually accompanies: the excited field effects; the sexual and generalized partition-conjunction; the fantasy insofar as it participates in field effects and blurs functionings, especially in its version of fundamental fantasy <7I5>; the spatial and temporal vastness that the German die Weite conveys, which comprises an imponderable, non-referenced dilatation. Ultimately, desire calls forth desire, desire for the desire of the other: "amabam amare et amari", confessed Augustine.

The nature of desire is best clarified by its opposition to that of need, which is a matter of lack and of functionings. The western reader is used to consider desire as the consequence of a lack (as in Plato's penia, indigence) and, even when taken positively, as just a functioning among others (as in Deleuze's "mechanical arrangements" of desire). But here we must warn the reader that the anthropogeny supposes that he has grasped how much desire is neither of these two orders: to desire is neither to greed (by emptiness), nor wünschen (by fullness). Its paradoxes are due to the presence-absence that polarizes it, making the desire as immense and suspended as presence-absence is.

8F. Semiotic types

In the previous chapters, we have not yet encountered images, music or languages. Yet, what we have so far seen of functionings and of presence-absence embraces enough of the hominid existence for the anthropogeny to already take a first global view of Homo's semiotic field. And even a view of its general distribution, which goes from significations to senses [plural], to the sense [singular], to the Sense [capitalized], to signifiance.

8F1. Significations

If it is true that a sign is a segment of the world that thematizes another while depleting in this thematization <4A>, signification (signum, facere) is the most current use of the sign. In this case, signs thematize a defined designated, often practical, and this designated is so pregnant or salient that these signs fade away in front of it, as designators. Signification is often accompanied by presence (presentiality, phenomenality), but this presence adheres so much to the practical urgency of the designated object that it does not have the opportunity to flourish, or even to be seen as such.

8F2. Senses

However, for indicalizing and indexating Homo, very often the designated are vague or imperfectly able to be pointed to, or frankly pointable but undetermined, in which case we often say that their designators have senses rather than significations. Such is the case when signs point to or trace (a) places, times, directions, orientations ("walking in the sense of an arrow, of an indexating finger, of the hands of a watch"); (b) relatively precise designated but in an open field ("in what sense do you understand this word?") ; (c) processes with an aim or that are simply continuing according to an internal consistency, but without an envisaged term ("common sense"). Thus understood, senses are sometimes indicium, sometimes indexes, sometimes calculations, sometimes mere speculations, and are often accompanied by a more vivid presence-absence than the significations are, because they are freed of the absorbing details of particular things-performances-in-situation.

8F3. Sense versus nonsense

Sometimes emerges, on the occasion of specific processes, the notion, the idea or the sentiment of a process as a process or as a general course of things, where senses that are plural in a first while become one sense, in the singular form. This often is accompanied by an insistence of the presence-absence, and it is in Becket's Waiting for Godot, where presence-absence is the theme, that we read "something follows its course". The English nonsense, of which the French non-sens is a too rational equivalent, designates a disruption that affects precisely that sense, that of the process as such.

8F4. Sense [capitalized] versus Non Sense

What we have seen of the three major ideations of presence-absence – i.e. eternity, ubiquity, spontaneity - augurs that homo should sometimes postulate, beyond relative senses or beyond a singular sense, a capitalized, absolute Sense and that the latter would then create a couple with an equally absolute Non Sense. The paths of Sense/Non Sense, where thematization of presence-absence is maximal, have been manifold, and we shall focus on two of them.

(a) One path is to follow so far the functionings, and therefore the order of means and ends, that we end up with the idea of a Primary Cause and Ultimate End, of an Alpha-Omega cycle, where the functionings are both justified and transcended, reconciled with presence-absence to the point that they seem to be born from it, to become an expression of it. In the West, this would one day become the Aristotle Causality (noèsis noèseôs), the Thom's Causality (intellectus infinitus), the Leibniz' Reason of Being, the Hegel's Substance-Conscience. And popularly, since the Roman Stoics, this will become the Providence, the in-advance and the all-encompassing view, in a general intelligibility of all that has been, is and will be.

(b) The other path, which was the most used at the scale of the planet and of the species, is to put the area of functionings between parenthesis, and to consider it as an illusion or an appearance, and to thematize the area of presence-absence as the only essential and truth, where an eternity-ubiquity-spontaneity coincides with it. We think here to the doxa of pre-Socratic Parmenides, the Buddha's Nirvana, and the Lao Tzu's Tao.

8F5. The Cryptic

So, Homo frequently targets things inaccessible through the negation of something that is accessible to sight, hearing, touch, smell or taste. Massive or semi-permeable, direct or indirect negation. For example, it is the veil, or the tumulus of earth and stone, dissimulating an object, or delimiting an emptiness, and which thereby want to point out something else, or the Other. Or it will be the practices of the indecipherable in writings. In intergesture and interlocution, these are the silences, reserves, gaps, apotropaisms, or even negative substantives, whenever the dialect allows it: "in-finite", "un-limited", "un-conditional. This last process invaded Sanskrit, where it gave way to a "negative theology", that we also find in our Neo-Platonism. "The divine is the non-finite, the non-form, the non-intelligent, the non-will, the non-act, etc."

The crypt [as subterranean construction] exemplifies this approach which, to reveal a beyond or a beneath, hides (krupteïn) or dissimulates (similis, dis-). The cryptic [as a semiotic type] can target functionings, for example in secret rites that increase the social power of a group. But it mainly concerns presence-absence. This approach is so archaic that we can see its announcement in a cover of leaves with which a group of chimpanzees covers a dead young congener.

8F6. Signifiance

Finally, we shall signal, for its considerable anthropogenic role, a universal hominid practice which is, in signs, to insist so much on the designators as designators that the designated take on a far-away, even optional status. We then speak sometimes of signifiance, as opposed to signification and to sense, somewhat like we distinguish the remembrance, with its floating content, from the memory, with its determined content. And this, regardless of whether we are talking about the signification, the senses, the sense or the Sense.

Signifiance so understood has a direct effect of awakening some presence, or some absence, and even very precisely presence-absence, as the signs, exempted from a pressing referent, intensify here their capacity of distanciation as such. This re-joins hominid desire and pleasure so much that, apart from very requiring technical situations and some urgent social conflicts, Homo took pleasure on a daily basis to use his signs in a state of signifiance, i.e. as being first of all designators with available designated: "Democracy", "duty", "the future", "nation". Assuredly in everyday moral, political and philosophical statements. But also in exact sciences, as soon as they depart from their controllable propositions.

8G. Semiotic transmissions

The distribution of semiotic types under the light of the functionings/presence-absence distinction enlightens as well the three main types of hominid transmissions, i.e. communication, communion and participation.

8G1. Communication

In urgent functionings, the transmission of information needs to be adequate, whether by signs in Homo or by stimuli-signals in the animal. We then call it communication, as in the reference title of Norbert Wiener: Cybernetics or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (1948). In Homo, this is the case with artisan injunctions, experimentation in exact sciences, mathematical writing, and some constraining indicia, which Aristotle designated using "tekmèria" to oppose them to "semeïa", vague indicia. Assuredly, in hominid specimens, communication becomes less adequate as broader – and therefore blurrier – concepts are used, like in an educational or political program, or a page of philosophy. However, progressive approximations and rectifications remain sought and practicable in this case, and it is then still a question of communication, even approximate, even illusory.

8G2. Communion

However, some transmissions convey something of the field effects of the presence-absence experienced by a group or a particular. This presence-absence being uncoordonnable de jure and even indescribable is no longer relevant of communication in the understood sense. In French, the only word befitting this is communion, probably because the speaker forgets its real etymology, which refers to "munus" (charge to be accomplished) as in "communication", and that he only hears the false etymology, where "unio" and "cum", union-with, stay afloat without the demand for a determined message.

We could not exclude that some night howlings of dogs and wolves have a communional aspect along with the information that they convey. But hominid specimens thematize and target presence-absence, and thus the communion which is its sharing, its multiplying reverberation. Tangentially through a prolonged meal, drink, talk, stroking, intercourse. Or frontally in the words of Dostoyevsky’s drunkards, a verse from the Psalmist, a beatitude from Jesus, a surah from the Qur'an, a gesture from Buddha, a poem by Rumi, an illumination from Rimbaud, a phrase from Schumann, a paragraph from Poincare on the thermodynamic death of the worlds, a certain turn of the pen of Weinberg describing the Planet seen from a plane under the light of the universal fossil beaming at 2,7K. However, while communion seduces some hominid specimens by its presence-absence, it also repulses others because of its rupture with the order of controllable functionings. Two attitudes have thus prevailed, and the Qur'an formulated them with its customary intransigence by making a distinction between the Shuddering Ones and the Erasing Ones (Chouraki). We could not exclude that some night howlings of dogs and wolves have a communional aspect along with the information that they convey. But hominid specimens thematize and target presence-absence, and thus the communion which is its sharing, its multiplying reverberation. Tangentially through a prolonged meal, drink, talk, stroking, intercourse. Or frontally in the words of Dostoyevsky’s drunkards, a verse from the Psalmist, a beatitude from Jesus, a surah from the Qur'an, a gesture from Buddha, a poem by Rumi, an illumination from Rimbaud, a phrase from Schumann, a paragraph from Poincare on the thermodynamic death of the worlds, a certain turn of the pen of Weinberg describing the Planet seen from a plane under the light of the universal fossil beaming at 2,7K. However, while communion seduces some hominid specimens by its presence-absence, it also repulses others because of its rupture with the order of controllable functionings. Two attitudes have thus prevailed, and the Qur'an formulated them with its customary intransigence by making a distinction between the Shuddering Ones and the Erasing Ones (Chouraki).

The term communion is, moreover, also appropriate to the sharing of religious, political, scientist, disciplical beliefs, i.e. to these knowledge in which the content is mainly verified by the rhythm of the perceptive-motor and logico-semiotic field effects that it awakens in individuals or in a group <7I8>. Thus, it is rare for thematizations of presence-absence not to be accompanied by sentiments of faith, mostly religious, and conversely, it is rare for sentiments of faith, particularly when they are religious, not to somewhat thematize presence-absence. The most usual communion is that achieved by the resonance of the sound between a musician and his audience, between several concerting musicians, between musicians and the composer, of whom they share the origin by resourcing.

8G3. Participation

The most frequent hominid practice lies then in participation, which consists in subtle dosages of communication and communion. While the side of "taking sides” (prendre parti, in French) is slicing (partire, distribute), and while the part of "being part" supposes a whole, the part of "taking part" - without being truly possessable and exchangeable - is nevertheless thematizable as an element of exchange by the distanciating and possibilizing hominid specimens. By combining the right dose of elementary communication and diffuse communion, participation had to intervene very early on in groups of uprighting primates, even before the differentiated gesture and later on the language constituted defined areas. Today, in spite of the increased importance of functional communication in advanced industrial societies, participation is still the most constant resort of hominid groups, particularly in family meals and business lunches.

8H. Destinies-Choices of existence. Conduct versus behavior

Amongst all the protocols and panoplies encountered in these first eight chapters, each hominid specimen realizes its own unique accentuations or mixtures, which make up its idiosyncrasy. These singular rates of reinforcement or blurriness are understood as a choice of existence or as a destiny of existence depending on whether one believes in "strong" or "weak" freedom as described above <8D>. We shall speak of destiny-choice of existence to signal the question whilst leaving it open.

Assuredly, in the destiny-choice of existence of a hominid specimen, everything matters: the manner in which it favors or disfavors any of the eight properties of the rhythm; whether it cultivates fantasies of objects or rather a fundamental fantasy or compulsional fantasies; whether it prefers static or kinetic or dynamic or excited field effects <7G>; whether it is sedentary or nomad, etc. Yet, four aspects are particularly important. We encountered them for the first time when we outlined an evocable referential to describe somewhat excited field effects. They are, because of their primordial character, (a) topology, (b) cybernetic, (c) logico-semiotic, (d) presentivity which are activated-passivated on this occasion. In other words, to describe the destiny-choice of existence of an individual or a people or an era means qualifying its topology, cybernetic, logico-semiotic, presentivity. This means choosing amongst the following rates:

A) TOPOLOGY, or rate of close/distant, encompassing/encompassed, contiguous/non-contiguous, continuous/non-continuous, compact/diffuse, open/closed, etc.

B) CYBERNETIC, or rates of negative/positive reaction (thus of feedback/ retroaction/ runaway), but also rates of submission/ bluff, playfulness/ seriousness, exploration/ coquetry, confrontation/ isolation, dream/ reverie.

C) LOGICO-SEMIOTIC, or rates of indiciality (indicium) / indexation, and rates of significations/sense/Sense/signifiance, or contingent/necessary/probable, etc.

D) PRESENTIVITY, or rates of functionings/ presence, presence/ absence (singular), presences-absences (plural), reality/ real, need/ desire, communication/ communion, but also emphasis on the fantasies of things-performance or the fantasies of *world, or partition-conjunction, or still, the fundamental fantasy <7I5>, etc.

The wording destiny-choice of existence thus defined will prove very useful. It will enable us recalling that images, music, languages, writings, theories, politics etc. are only ever realized through singular organisms, each having its own singular topological, cybernetic, logico-semiotic, presentive destiny-choice. By which each hominid specimen has a conduct, not only a behavior. Besides, we can also speak of the destiny-choice of existence of a group, for instance the Chinese versus the Europeans, the Pre-Socratics versus the Romantics, the Shiites versus the Sunnites, men versus women. A historian has never truly understood an era, a people, an individual, and an artist before he has grasped his destiny-choice of existence.

SITUATION 8

The distinction functionings/presence is enlightened by its history. Jean-Louis Laroche, then professor of psychology at the Montreal University, one day asked the author to write something on consciousness, at around the same time when the dying Bateson wrote that consciousness is the sole philosophical problem. The concept showed itself to be dual, covering both functionings (reasonings, perceptive constructions, sentiments, strategies, etc.) and another dimension: presence, even presence-absence. Functionings could be described and presence could not. Western "though" and then "consciousness" had mixed up or confounded the two, with regrettable theoretical and practical consequences, as pointed out by Kant. Our chapters 21-24 on Homo's theories will be the occasion to encounter the notions of thought and conscience in western philosophy, and the emergence since 1940 of the notion of presence.

As for the occasionalism invoked here as a pseudo-causal "relation" between functionings and presence-absence, it goes without saying that it is not that of Malebranche, which precisely intervened in the context of the primordial classic distinction: thought/world, which will become the distinction consciousness/world, with which the distinction functionings/presence is in radical rupture. However, the notion of ideation of presence-absence, here in the form of regulating ideas, is certainly influenced by Kant.

We shall not confound the Real of the Anthropogeny with Lacan's Real when he declares, in Radiophonie in Scilicet: "Thus, the real differs from reality". Indeed, since the trilogy "real, imaginary, symbolic" of his "Schéma R" <26E2b>, where the real is still the Reality, Lacan signaled, for example in Lacan in Italia, and then more and more frankly distinguished up to Ornicar: (a) a real of everyday objects, and also of celestial objects, which are attractive because they can be quantified, and the weight of which "encumbers" us, making us "sick of the real"; (b) a “real without fantasy”, the criterion of which is that it conceals some "impossible", i.e. some contradictory, which is not foreseen in Freud's "Realität". For Lacan, this "real without fantasy" can be glanced at on the occasion of paradoxical algorithms and non-figurable geometric forms, of "mathemes" (Möbius strip, Klein bottle, Borromean knot, Desargues' projective plane), which the Anthropogeny would rank among functionings that defy our capacities for coordination <26E2b>, and about which Lacanian mathematician René Lavendhomme gives a circumstanced presentation in Lieux du sujet, Le Seuil, 2001. On the contrary, the Real of this chapter only concerns the indescribable of presence-absence, leaving to the Reality everything relating to functionings - whether coordonnable and un-coordonnable, knowable or un-knowable.

Henri Van Lier

Translated by Paula Cook, 2017

(Last update, January 26, 2025)