The Trace Odyssey 1. Beatrice Galinon-Melenec

Translated from the English (United States) and edited by Claudine Tiercelin and Pierre Thibaud.

      40 40 Processus traçuels: author’s own terminology (= trace-process).

      41 41 Axioms: initial statements that serve as a starting point for observations and analyses of the paradigm (or theory) presented.

      42 42 Derrida (1974).

      43 43 Perrier (2014) in Petit et al. (2014).

      44 44 Bateson, Goffman, Hall, Watzlawick, texts in French collected by Yves Winkin in La Nouvelle communication, Paris, Seuil, Poche, 1984.

      45 45 This starts from the maternal cytoplasm and does not exclude epigenetic traces of the lineage.

      46 46 As was previously mentioned, when a semiotic process occurs it is because one goes from what one defines as the Real to what one defines by the term reality.

      47 47 In semiotics, “the body is not one field of analysis among others. The embodiment of signifying processes provides them with a substratum that imposes itself on all cognitive and emotional elaborations: interacting bodies preserve in their flesh or on their body the imprints of these interactions, and it is these imprints that must be identified, extracted, deciphered and interpreted” (Fontanille 2011).

      48 48 A.J. Greimas in “l’être-là”, a presence in the world that identifies itself in part with the concept of semiotic existence (Greimas 1993, p. 290).

      49 49 According to Tetsurō Watsuji, op. cit.

      50 50 This proposal stems from relatively recent epigenetic research that we presented in the series L’Homme-trace published by CNRS Éditions (see Galinon-Mélénec (2011)). Epigenetics is not the only approach. Psychology also questions related issues by discussing the idea of the transgenerational. Interdisciplinary can be established on the basis of the following definitions: “trans-from the Latin trans (beyond), a prefix that enters into the composition of a certain number of words, to add to their meaning the idea of “beyond”, “through”, etc.; generational, what is specific to a generation and to relations between generations, humans”. See É. Littré, Dictionnaire de la langue française, volume 7, p. 1220.

      51 51 To take “white for black” is an expression by Joachin du Bellay’s, who already stated it in 1549, in Chapter 6 of La Défense et l’illustration de la langue française (about translators, but this also applies to reading – which as we shall see later, is a “lettrure”).

      52 52 This term is translated more generally as Ichnos-Anthropos (ichnos: trace; anthropos: human). The hyphen (-) here, as in corps-trace and signe-trace, distinguishes this terminology from other terms and refers the reader to the systemic paradigms it symbolizes.

      53 53 For our part, we rely on the publications of Augustin Berque and we consider that the environment is a space within which the conditions of life are permanently determined and reciprocally generated in a “flow of relations that inseparably link subjects to objects, and these likewise to each other”, see Berque A., Écoumène, introduction à l’étude des milieux humains, Belin, Paris, 2000.

      54 54 Traces of a person’s milieu are present in them through their language, their culture, their way of approaching reality. Traces of the history of their species as well (the genetic structure and the reproduction system of their species are in them).

      55 55 Op. cit. p. 368–369.

      56 56 See the conclusion in Chapter 3.

      57 57 The person’s body is also continuously in contact with the Real, whose existence human beings are not aware of.

      58 58 By using the term différance with an “a” instead of the usual “e” in the spelling “difference”, we wish to refer the reader to the text by Derrida (1967).

      59 59 The reference here is Foucault’s definition: “Hypnomnemata, in the technical sense, could be account books, public registers, individual notebooks serving as memory aids”. See Foucault (2001, p. 1237).

      60 60 The French term “reliance” has two meanings. It implies the action of reconnecting (relier in French), or it means to connect both oneself and the results of this connection of the Self. In sociology, the reliance is defined as the creation of links among separated social actors, of which at least one is a human being. For Edgar Morin (1996), a well-known French philosopher, the reliance is inseparable to the interaction of complex systems.

      61 61 See Chapter 3, Figure 3.3: “The role of humans in the digital ecosystem apparatus”.

      62 62 The Trace Odyssey 1 also provides an opportunity to discover well-known authors in anthropology, philosophy, sociology, psychology and general human sciences (including Bateson, Barthes, Bourdieu, Derrida, Eco, Goffman, Hall, Kant, Jonas, Peirce, Ricoeur, Varela and Thomson, Watsuji, Watzlawick, etc