Albert Piette chose to “note”, regretting that he was not an artist who could express “time”. As an anthropologist, he has transformed his fear of time into acts of noting that have become central to his own work. His father, his daughters’ childhoods, the moments of a day and his experience of a blocked nose are “noted”. The author’s main aim is to show how, on the basis of such daily notes on his own life, it is possible to carry out anthropology. In so doing, he debates with artists, philosophers and anthropologists. Above all, he offers a radically different perspective on anthropology as a theoretical reflection on the “resistance” of being – the absolute being – from which he draws out the elementary laws of functioning. The book concludes with proposals for an ethics of noting as an antidote to violence.
Albert Piette is Professor of anthropology at the University of Paris-Nanterre and researcher at the Centre for Ethnology and Comparative Sociology (CNRS). His work is a critique of social anthropology, in which the human being is fragmented, diluted and even denied. His aim is to give existential anthropology a specific ‘topic”: the human being, each human being, in his or her singularity – what he calls a “volume of being”.