ABSTRACT
The cornerstone of a materialist anthropology that remains in tune with the theory of evolution and is nevertheless capable of accounting for the functioning of political institutions or the meaning of religious rituals consists of three fundamental logical categories: negation, modality of possibility, and infinite regression. The human being is specifically the animal that can introduce the little word “not” into any proposition; that is to say, the one that always knows how things are not. The human being is specifically the animal that, by using the phrase “it is possible that,” shows a lack of orientation in the environment and, at the same time, a dexterity in compensating for it through the elaboration of behaviours which are not fixed in advance. The human being is specifically the animal whose thought and passions collapse at times into an interminable backwards march, sanctioned by the formula “and so on, to infinity.”
