ABSTRACT
The notion of multiplicity understood appears to the author to be particularly fertile for orienting us toward what is called an anthropology of the body. This chapter begins to realize this by examining the different meanings of the fold, a word from the Latin plicare which means literally to pull a soft material back over itself, and which gave birth to the two verbs plier and ployer. Multiplicity calls for a mode of knowledge that is no longer structural but modal and, as concerns the body more particularly, a mode of knowledge that is no longer anatomical nor even physiological but choreographic. The chapter also examines the relationship between the two meanings of the word paradigm: in the sense of Thomas Kuhn—which designates a dominant epistemological model—and in the sense in which Émile Benveniste defined it, in order to distinguish it from syntagma.
