The death of Roger Caillois was vividly felt by writers and intellectuals all over the world. Not only in France, where his work in sociology, surrealism, criticism and literature brought him into the Académie française, but also in Japan, Brazil (whose Academy elected him to the seat previously occupied by André Malraux), in Argentina (where he counted numerous friends whose works and thought he had made known in Europe) his passing profoundly saddened literary and intellectual circles. Struck to the heart by his death also is the review Diogenes, which he founded and which has been formed by his perpetually needle-sharp curiosity, his creative imagination and his uncompromising precision.

The founders of linguistics frequently spoke of languages as living organisms, practically autonomous, invisible and sonorous parasites of man, imposing their variations on him according to their whims or mysterious laws. Mutatis mutandis, this long out-moded point of view is finding new favor today. Our beautiful languages are truly organic constructions which render a mutually comprehensible service and assure regularized relations. We can do no more than use them well. However, as opposed to animals and societies, these organisms are immortal. They can disappear, of course, through suppression or denationalization of their human support, but not through old age or disease. The corruption of a previous state is already the maturation of a successive state just as young and healthy as the other. With uninterrupted adjustments and retouchings, each generation expresses all its knowledge and all its hopes with as many nuances as its own sensitivity requires. Thus the history of a language is a never-ending embryology which passes through metamorphoses without disjunction. Italian and French do not “derive” from Latin, they are Latin in an evolved and evolving state.

Let us enter linguistics by the “gateway of the senses.” The ambiguity of French itself, in which sens signifies both sensation and meaning, leads us to this Janus-portal, a place for elementary exchanges between the self and the world, where Saint Thomas stationed himself to work out a theory of the encounter between the philosophical subject and object or, rather, using his terms, between the cognoscens (active present participle) and cognitum (neuter nominative/accusative of a passive past participle…) The very heart of all diathesis.**

The presence of women in possession cults has frequently been noted. Thus women are usually the priviliged religious participants in Haitian Voo-doo and in the African Bori Hausa. Even allowing for the distinction of whether the role of religious chief is held by a male or a female, it seems women are in the majority in the cases representing almost the totality of those cultists who fall into a trance. In this article we propose to compare the position of women within two possession cults in Brazil. One, Candomblé is of African origin; the other, Umbanda, is a synthesis of African religions, Catholicism, and the spiritism of Allan Kardec. We shall attempt in each case to associate the religious position of women with the social position they exercise in each society.

A transnational enterprise is an information and decision system that directs the common strategy of business establishments operating under several jurisdictions; its objective is precise and concrete: it is to realize a profit by producing and selling goods or services, computers perhaps or hamburgers, or leisure, under such names as I.B.M. or VW, McDonald or Club Mediterranée.

There are two cultural principles operative in contemporary Japan; one is a relatively new principle derived from the West, and the other a traditional Eastern principle.

These two principles are, at least in contemporary Japan, contradictory to one another: the Western principle is considered to be an anti-naturalistic one stressing technique, while the traditional Eastern principle is essentially one founded on naturalism.

China was the first country beyond Europe with an important civilization to receive scientific theory from the West in the modern era. Neither in India nor in Japan (where the first Western works arrived from China and were quickly banned) nor a fortiori in other missionary countries was there an early acquaintance with European sciences. In China the first handbook of Western geometry was printed in 1607, the first treatise of astronomy in 1614. After 1584 a map of the world, inspired no doubt by that of Ortelius of 1570, was engraved in stone. Printed versions spread quickly in China and continued into Korea and Japan. The algebraic notation of Viète, plane and solid trigonometry, logarithms (called then the rules of Neper), the cosmology of Aristotle and the methods of astronomical calculation of Tycho Brahe were all introduced into China during the course of the 17th century.

At its birth, a new scientific discipline is baptized with the names of the two parent disciplines, Science X and Science Y. Subsequently, usage tends to shorten this compound name by giving preference to one or the other of the constituting terms so that the new term is less disconcerting and novel. Take biophysics, for example. Is it more closely related to physics than to biology, or the other way round? Today this question seems naive but it did not appear so a scarce thirty years ago, that is, at the beginning of the creative activity of the most, eminent scientists in the field of biophysics: it was then the subject of intense discussion.