Anthropology, Anthropo-analysis, Love and Utopia

di Albert Piette

“Somebody was here, and the next minute there is nobody here at all” (Weil 1945: 321)

“Whatever duties we have towards other species, those we have towards humanity are first and absolute” (Wolff 2021: 209)

“That childhood was, this nameless/ pledge the gods kept, don’t let what becomes revoke it./ Even the prisoner, rotting to dark in his cell,/ has had her secretly tending him until he dies./ For she holds the heart safe above all transience./ Even the dying, when their fixed stare shows they know it,/ even when their own room no longer answers them/ since it is curable – all their curable objects/ lying about them, fevered, infected,/ but still curable -/ yet even here, for these dying/ childhood bears fruit” (Rilke 2006: 222-223 – Unfinished Elegy).

I feel ‘challenged’ every time an even insignificant moment has passed and also that the unknown being with whom I shared it continues on his or her way. Of course, I do not cry when I leave my travelling companion, on the train or in the underground, whom I will never see again – and who does not give me a glance so that I can greet him or her. But I am at least experiencing this separation intellectually. My question is all the more significant given that I know these beings hold out beyond anything, whatever the case – but only until their death, an unforeseeable moment. Are this ‘strength’ and this ‘ephemerality’ intrinsic to the beauty of singularity, do they constitute it, contributing directly to my questioning? Of course, I can understand why the reader might find these sentences rather trite.

A utopia is something that does not exist but which, in the back of our minds, we would like to see come true. When it is at this stage, we need others to help us define it, clarify it and bring even the tiniest part of it to life. That is the purpose of these few reflections directly addressed to the reader.

Here is a well-known quote from Mauss’s The Gift:

«In those economies and legal regimes that have preceded our own, we never, so to speak, see the simple exchange of goods, wealth, and products that occurs in individual trades. First of all, it is not individuals but collectivities that mutually oblige one another, make exchanges and contracts; the persons present at a contract are moral persons: clans, tribes, and families, which confront and oppose one another, either in groups face to face in the field itself, or through the intermediary of their chiefs, or in both fashions at once. In addition, what they exchange are not exclusively goods and wealth, movable and fixed goods, or economically useful things. They are above all pleasantries, banquets, rites, military services, women, children, feasts, fairs, of which the market is only one aspect, and where the circulation of wealth is only one term of a much more general and much more permanent contract. Finally, these prestations and counterprestations are entered into somewhat more voluntarily, by way of presents and gifts (cadeaux), although ultimately they are strictly compulsory, on pain of private or public war. We have proposed to refer to all this as the system of total prestations» (Mauss 2016: 60-61).

My utopia would, in fact, be a far cry from the potlatch. But Mauss’s text allows me to clarify certain points. It would consist of each person ‘taking notes’ on another. I prefer to say ‘taking notes’ rather than ‘describing’, as the latter implies a more systematic and organised approach.

There would be no goods or objects to give or receive, nor any rituals, nor any excess aimed at domination. What would be “total” is the very being that each person would have to look at, in all their characteristics, traits and qualities. It would be giving without giving anything: only one’s being, but at the same time, the observed does not separate himself or herself from his or her own being. It is almost self-evident: the being does not detach himself or herself. Let us say, all things considered, that a being is given to the note-taker, who receives them in order to observe and to take notes. Later, the note-taker may become the one being observed, and the one being note-taken may become the note-taker. Each note-taker would have one or more beings; would one of these beings be the note-taker of someone other than their own note-taker? Not necessarily. Should the note-taker have his or her being from another region, another country, another continent? Why not? At this level, would regulation need to be carried out by an institution? How would this sort of practice spread? I do not know. In any case, it is essential for such a practice to be possible in all regions of the world. I think an anthropologist could play a part in this learning process.

The challenge is simple: to teach and create a shared awareness of the singularity of each individual as a resistant but also limited phenomenon – as if this radical lucidity of time and at the same time of the singular invited an ethics of note-taking. Leaving behind their academic posture, anthropologists would open their own ‘offices’, like other professions, such as psychoanalysts. The anthropologist would be an anthropo-analyst. Three modes, three services would be possible, with the aim of creating a kind of ‘reserve’ of singularities [1]. As a first step, it is also important to promote the ‘singularist’ ethos, thereby highlighting the importance of each individual’s uniqueness, also showing that such exercices are possible in practice: this is one of the dimensions of the first two ‘services’.

1-Anthropo-analysing. The first service would be to carry out an anthropo-analysis of one being at a time, which would be addressed to the anthropo-analyst. The latter would offer his skills to anyone who wanted them: observing, filming, taking notes. To be ‘anthropo-analysed’: everyone could have their own anthropo-analyst, to keep a record and an analysis. Have your own anthropologist to do your own anthropography! In the past, people went to a painter or photographer to have their portraits taken…

There are differences between this objective and psychoanalysis. For example, in anthropo-analysis, a being should be looked at in his or her entirety, with all his or her components (action, emotion, thoughts, memories, skills, unique stylistic traits, etc.), while identifying the dominant activations of one or the other depending on the moment. Similarly, in the proposal of anthropo-analysis, there is no component that needs to be improved in order to achieve therapeutic transformation. The question of singularity also makes clear the difference between psychoanalysis and anthropo-analysis. The anthropo-analyst would like to lose nothing of the singularity of his or her observed and is ready to test various methodologies to this end, without necessarily any interpersonal issues between the two. In a clinical context, the cautious questions of Dorothée Legrand and Clara Taramasco, who seek to establish the ethics of their work, are not at all those of the anthropo-analyst:

«Are we going to present a ‘clinical case’ in detail, in short, multiple ‘vignettes’, or are we going to dispense with the actual words spoken by the patients in favour of those of the ‘experts’ who interpret them? How can we respect the anonymity of these young women while preserving the details that make them so unique, and without which their stories would drown in indifference? Can we believe for a moment that obtaining their ‘informed consent’ and the legal authorisation of a committee will immunise us against the risks inherent in taking their word [...] Is the risk that the young women concerned will be recognised, or is it more fundamentally that they will recognise themselves, reduced to a vignette, or commented on as a case?» (Legrand and Taramaco 2016: 318).

The anthropo-analyst points out that a singularity cannot be inferred only from the acts of asking, listening, or responding, how it often is in clinical moment. He would like to know more: what does it feel like to be, for example, a clinician listening? Or to be the one saying what they are suffering? What are they thinking during this moment? But also, and most importantly: what are they doing before, after, where are they going after the clinical moment and with what modes of being? “You cannot follow a case or a patient over time, writes Patrick Declerck on psychoanalysis. It is too long, too complicated and too remote” (Declerck 2001: 77). All the more reason, I would say, to carry it out in anthropology. The anthropo-analyst wants to observe and take very detailed notes: the gestures, the feelings that need to be made explicit, the variations, but also the constancy, in a continuity of situations. The number of these and the duration of the film or non-film observation would have been defined in advance. Thus anthropo-analysed, the being would receive written and filmic documents, with a detailed analysis of what constitutes his or her singularity. With this practice, something of anthropo-analysis is beginning to be understood.

2- Teaching self-anthropo-analysis. Another possibility is that anthropo-analyst trains people to carry out their own self-anthropo-analysis, for example, to keep up the diaristic exercise as assiduously as possible. I quote two remarks of writers: “If sometimes I write it is because certain things do not want to separate from me and I do not want to separate from them either. Writing them is the act by which, through the pen and the hand, and as if by osmosis, they penetrate me forever” (Campo 1992: 177). Thoughts in particular: it is difficult, sometimes impossible to note them: “So while I am taking a few notes, time passes, as Christa Wolf writes, simultaneously a tiny piece of my life comes into being – and passes away. Does life thus consist of innumerable microscopic pieces of time like that? Remarkable, however, that we cannot catch it” (Wolf 2007: 13). This is how, but the challenge is to continue: take notes, try, try again, also use mnemonic devices to describe from them later.

Virginia Woolf commented on Montaigne, not without pointing out this difficulty:

«The phantom is through the mind and out of the window before we can lay salt on its tail, or slowly sinking and returning to the profound darkness which it has lit up momentarily with a wandering light. [...]. But the pen is a rigid instrument; it can say very little; it has all kinds of habits and ceremonies of its own. [...]. It is for this reason that Montaigne stands out from the legions of the dead with such irrepressible vivacity» (Woolf 1925).

“Observe, observe perpetually, and, so long as ink and paper exist, “sans cesse et sans travail”[2], Montaigne will write”, who also saw it as a “rugged road, more than it seems”. Kant, for his part, is more than radical and pessimistic about the methodological difficulty of self-observation: “to concern oneself in the least with spying and, as it were, the affected composition of an inner history of the involuntary course of one’s thoughts and feelings [...] is the most direct path to illuminism or even terrorism” (Kant 2006: 72). It is difficult indeed, we understood, but this seems to me to be an exaggeration. As Virginia Woolf says of Montaigne, “by means of perpetual experiment and observation of the subtlest he achieved at last a miraculous adjustment of all these wayward parts that constitute the human soul” (Woolf 1925). Here, in addition to specific introspective techniques (helping to raise awareness of bodily feelings and sensations) accompanied by note-taking that the anthropo-analyst could teach, I would only recommend reading ten pages of Proust or Woolf (especially her diary) carefully every day, to which can be added the pages of various diaries that everyone has at their disposal on their book shelves. It is up to the anthropo-analyst to encourage and maintain the tenacity of those who wish to do so. We are at the heart of the singularity that is felt and lived. It is indeed important that this second ‘service’ makes clear the difficulty and the feasibility of the exercise, with everyone understanding that each other is also a ‘whole’ to be protected in a spirit of trust – I insist on this point –, thereby enabling them to move on to the third dimension.

3- Teaching to anthropo-analyse another. The third service – essential for realising my utopia – would be to teach everyone to look at others, not ‘the’ others, but one at a time: to look at a being, to take notes. I have never been able to teach this in universities. Perhaps, in reality, the audience for this kind of learning is not the students who, in anthropology courses, are looking for something other than learning to look at their neighbor or their fleeting subway companion. Rilke sketches out the key method: to look at one human being, to follow them and to observe their actions and their ways of being present.

«Since I was following close behind him [...], the man ahead of me raised one leg and hopped down the steps to the street, as children who are having fun sometimes hop and skip when they’re walking. The steps on the other side he cleared in a single bound. But scarcely was he up on the pavement than he again drew up one leg a little and hopped up high on the other foot, then did it again and again» (Rilke 2009: 43-44).

And so on for many lines. It is not a miracle; it is a matter of repeated trials and experiments. Virginia Woolf adds this crucial point which requires a great deal of attention:

«one of the memoir writer’s difficulties – one of the reasons why, though I read so many, so many are failures. They leave out the person to whom things happened. The reason is that it is so difficult to describe any human being. So they say: ‘This is what happened’; but they do not say what the person was like to whom it happened. And the events mean very little unless we know first to whom they happened. Who was I then?» (Woolf 1985: 65).

There is indeed a being that exists with its constant singularity resisting what happens. But then who describes beings? Neither the psychoanalyst, nor even the writer: it is definitely up to an anthropologist to do it and to teach how to do it. This also means that a goal of resemblance must be maintained. The word ‘observe’ reinforces this idea, meaning “to conform to what is prescribed, to take heed, to consider with attention”. The historical meanings indicate the idea of “watching with attention”, of “careful examination”. The word comes from the Latin ob-servare, servare meaning “to observe, pay attention to, keep an eye on, guard, preserve, keep intact, save”. And ob-, the prefix, confirms this set of meanings, since it means “in front of”, which also implies a distance [3].

Let us assume that from now on – whilst I am waiting for readers’ proposals – all human beings could be trained to observe and take notes on one another… And what if this work were about love? Methodological, ethical and erotic love, based on the same principle that Yves Bonnefoy recalls in his own way: “La poésie comme l’amour doit décider que les êtres sont” (Bonnefoy 1983: 101)[4]. Let us add: anthropology. There is a trio worth considering, or at least a duo: anthropology and love. In a world full of love, the anthropologist would be at the centre! Such an anthropologist does not seek to “de-anthropologise”, as anthropology might say today, but on the contrary, he conceives his work as a tribute to the human being. Describing a being – a volume of being as I have often said recently –, implies extracting a person from his or her situations, contexts, relations with others. This would be the anthropological act par excellence, even though it is not the most widely used approach in the history of anthropology. And incidentally, this implies a reversal of Mauss’s sociological programme, which focuses on the total social fact, from which the individual cannot escape – what leads Marc Augé to claim that “the individuality he [Mauss] considers is one that represents the culture, a typical individuality” (Augé, 2009: 21). The extraction I am referring to is, in fact, the opposite of ethnography, which studies social relations; hence my call for a “non-ethnography” (Piette 2025). In a way, what we usually call ‘love’ resembles this: making a being emerge among others and looking at him or her. Of course, love, let us say erotic love, between two beings does not consist of descriptions, one describing the other… Although… In his research, the anthropologist would thus practise a form of methodological love: looking and describing each being, as it is extracted from their situations – one at a time, for as long as possible… This programme would resemble what Roland Barthes suggests in Camera Lucida: “I had arrived at this curious notion: why mightn’t there be, somehow, a new science for each object? A mathesis singularis (and no longer universalis)?” (Barthes 1981: 8).

In the reflection of this article, I do not wish to dwell on the disciplinary and academic implications [5]. I am returning to my utopia, realizing that this mathesis singularis aligns with the ethical dimension of the irreducible singularity of a human being, and in particular that of the face, which Levinas presents as “signification without context” (Levinas 1982: 86), adding that the other “is not a character within a context” (ibidem: 86). His “nudity” has value in itself and “not by reference to a system”, “by itself, kath’auto, signifying before we have projected light upon it” (Levinas 1969: 74-75). This “nudity” is also concrete, that of a human being. Such, then, would be the ethical love that consists in looking at any being encountered by chance in everyday life, learning to look at him or her, learning to take notes on him or her. And the anthropo-analyst would teach that, he would be the ‘advisor’, so that everyone would have his or her own notebook of beings. Everyone would take notes on one being, for example, one being a day. The notebooks would fill up and a ‘micro-ethics of everyday life’ would develop. Beings would be given, without them leaving the giver, and received in their own way; notes would be given and received in their own way: gift and counter-gift. There would be plenty of note-takers and plenty of persons being ‘noted’. There would be a virtue in looking and note-taking: learning to look better and better, to take notes better and better, to think that there is a being in front of you. This ethical love would be a way of contributing to love as a “civic virtue”, of which Nigel Rapport (2018)[6] speaks with rare force in anthropology, with a view to respecting individualities free from socio-cultural categorization.

I want to persevere in my hope for note-taking: a world of humans who are note-takers of themselves and others. Lovers of moments and of each person’s uniqueness, they would never hurt anyone. It would be necessary to teach in schools the desire and the practice of taking notes on beings, perhaps more a genuine desire than the practice There, everyone would learn to look better, to listen better and, so that these two attitudes are not trivialised, to take notes. Taking notes as a guarantee of peace, and the anthropo-analyst in a new key role! The utopia of a world without violence, thanks to note-taking? In itself, note-taking is an anti-violence, a resistance to organised violence. Every soldier would simply have to replace his weapon with a notebook.

This is a very, very small contribution compared to the horror of the world – but I do not see how a political manifesto worthy of the name can fail to pay close attention to the uniqueness of every individual.

Dialoghi Mediterranei, n. 82, novembre 2026 

[*] Abstract

In questo breve articolo, l’“antropo-analisi” viene presentata come un’utopia, in cui tutti imparerebbero a osservare l’altro, a prendere appunti su di lui o lei, e giungerebbero così a comprendere l’unicità e la fragilità di ogni essere umano. Tra l’essere e gli appunti si creerebbe una sorta di dono e contro-dono. Prendere appunti fungerebbe quindi da deterrente contro qualsiasi forma di violenza. In qualità di antropo-analista, l’antropologo diventerebbe il principale consulente di tale formazione. 

Note