Now that we have reached the final stage of our exposition concerning the emergence of Homo gemeinwesen, it is worth clarifying once again how the choice of this title arose.¹ Above all, we adopted it to be able to designate the species that was to replace Homo sapiens. Since the future of the latter has been the loss of community, of continuity, and the quasi-hypertelic development of the process of knowledge – which enabled it to compensate for this loss (dynamic of substitution) and to justify itself – we needed a term that was capable of integrating within itself what had been lost. However, we do not aim to impose it: the men and women of the future will designate themselves according to their deep feelings about their future.

The preceding chapters already contain all the presuppositions for the becoming of Homo gemeinwesen, because they set out both the wandering of Homo sapiens and the desires manifested within both men and women to escape from such wandering; to found another dynamic by rediscovering community [communauté] and reconciling with nature; by perceiving the unitary and multiple power of affectivity and empathy.

The becoming of Homo gemeinwesen implies an immense inversion that will draw on the contribution of all the movements that have opposed the wandering of the species. It will require a conscious and willing dynamic.

On the subject of this becoming, we need to clarify what we wrote in Prelude 2: “We have already indicated that we will be led to create the organs that will enable us to realise this new species. This statement is fundamentally linked to the characterisation of the phylum Homo: access to reflexivity. In other words, the phase into which we are entering is one in which we must steer our becoming; specifying that, rather than producing or even creating – words that imply a separation, a kind of prosthesis-making – it is a question of inducing from our specific-individual body all that is necessary for our transformation."²  As I state in the citation, we cannot speak of creation. Similarly, we cannot simply refer to reflexivity without simultaneously indicating that any intervention will take place by means of participation within the species, nature, the cosmos; otherwise, we will veer towards re-actualising separation. What is fundamental, however, is the insistence on willing.

For the dynamic to be effectively voluntary and conscious, it must not be weighted down with unconscious ontosis-speciosis, relics of millennial wandering. This implies, both at the individual and species levels, an intense reliving of experience [revécu] capable of deactivating the various imprints that were formed during this wandering.

From this inversion we can access continuity and unfold. It fundamentally involves reconciliation with nature, which can only be achieved by reconciling the sexes. The separation from nature was brought about with the enslavement of women and the reinforcement of the repression of the naturalness of the baby, of the child. Everything else follows from this. I have already set out the essential moments of this other becoming in various articles. I won't return to it here.³

I think that on a small scale this phenomenon is already taking shape. It is of great importance to give proof of this because of the scope of the work carried out and, above all, because of its paleontological dimension. This is revealed to us by Nathalie Rouquerol and Fañch Moal in their book La Vénus de Lespugue.⁴  It is Nathalie Rouquerol who presents the “revelation” to us:

“although created by a mind inhabited by a mentality and beliefs inaccessible to us, the enigma of this work is unlocked, or at least in part. This study – combining technical, scientific observation and intuition – demonstrates a plausible and well-argued hypothesis, that of the representation of the perpetual movement of life, of the future of women and of humanity, built upon and supported by the first ideas of our predecessors.” (106-107)

Indeed, she shows us (95-102) that the statue of less than 15 cm must be handled in a certain way,⁵  sometimes by switching hands, and that in doing so we discover that it represents birth, then adolescence, the mature woman, the matron and even death. She insists:

"[...] the artist, thanks to a harmony, both sensitive and technical, whose cause we have detailed, and which emanates from the creature, invites us to touch it and turn it over, to look at all its surfaces, again and again, because the transmission of life will be endless. The artist perhaps asserts themselves as believing in their own distant future and perhaps that of everyone else." (101)

She continues:

"... a being has given form to the hope and permanence of the human lineage, for its own past, for its present, for its future ... Thanks to this allegory we are connected, we are also recipients of this message. Of course, we do not know how these peoples conceived of time...” (101)

Rouquerol goes on to emphasise the species dimension contained in this work: “The Venus of Lespugue ... is an ode to the timelessness of the generation of the species, a poetry dedicated to human filiation ... in an alchemy that condenses in a unique creature the becoming of feminine life, the artist transmutes an individual itinerary into the destiny of the entire human species that is dependent on giving birth ..." (110)

In fact, to fully understand the meaning of this work we have recourse to an inversion, which, in a certain way, is suggested by the author. We can't separate individuality from the species. As far as time is concerned, I think that it had not yet been invented because it implies a separation from the totality that took place much later. What was required was a continuum of experience and duration in which men and women could find their bearings without confounding the various moments.

Another dimension of inversion is to challenge the idea, the belief, that our distant ancestors were backward. Such an idea sets-up a break between them and us, a break that is generative of incomprehension. Now:

“This ivory sculpture, so silent and yet so verbose, demonstrates in any case that these humans from fifteen to thirty thousand years ago cannot be considered as inferior beings, and consequently it proves that any hierarchy between populations, whether past or contemporary, reflects opinions that are definitively out of date in the light of the demonstration that we are proposing; that of the luminous and creative intelligence of which humanity was capable over twenty thousand years ago.” (104)

“Perhaps, on the contrary, it is we who – despite our theoretical and technical progress, our reason, our utilitarianism and our efficiency, not to mention our productivity and domination – have since lost something of what pertains to sensitivity, sensation, affectivity, uncertainty, intuition, play and therefore the art of being human? In other words, are we experiencing dehumanisation?” (105)

Such an observation and the accompanying questioning imply the putting in place of inversion so as to escape extinction, which is confirmed in the following consideration:

 “This statuette demonstrates the permanence, the belief in human genius that has long since emerged; it shows us that men and women, if they retain hope, have a chance to surpass themselves. Perhaps it would prove Jean-Baptiste Lamarck wrong [...] who, in 1817, wrote a prophetic phrase: ‘Man is destined to exterminate himself after having rendered the globe uninhabitable.’” (106)⁶  

To put it plainly: regression and the risk of extinction is exactly what we are experiencing with an artificialization that is taking place on an ever-increasing scale.

The inversion is also evident in the questioning of the appellation ‘Venus’ not only for the Lespugue statuette but for all others of the same type. It is also evident in the fact that it is not considered a work of art. These two facts are linked because to speak of ‘Venus’ is to invoke canonical beauty, a foundation of art; all of which is determined by the existence of the State. This statuette is the profound expression of a lived experience and its insertion into the continuity of the species, as well as that of the man or woman who created it.

Finally, “...nothing ... permits us to automatically attribute a divine significance to this sculpture.” (108) Indeed, it is not a goddess, because gods and goddesses did not appear until the Neolithic period. Once again, we see a link to the birth of the State and the enslavement of women both of which correspond to the abstraction of a principle that is hypostasised and autonomised.

What contributes to establishing the statuette’s primordial importance is its positivity: “La Dame de Lespugue is also an ode from the depths of time, to that half of humanity that, in certain places today, is so badly treated.” (105) This is decisive because without the reaffirmation of the essentiality of women, no inversion is possible. This will manifest itself by means of the end of the separation of the child from the mother⁷  which correlates simultaneously with the end of the theorisation of the baby's dependence, by rediscovering the power of the continuity it contains.

What is evident to us is that the men of the distant prehistoric era must have enjoyed a deep sense of fullness because of their role as fertilisers, and thus felt very much a part of the natural process, of nature, because it is absolutely clear that they were perfectly aware of their role in reproduction. “Let us add a remark about the alleged absence of cause and effect between the sexual act and pregnancy (...) In our opinion, Palaeolithic humans, with an observational acuity for the whole of nature in which they were immersed and that we will never be able to match again, surely knew that neither a solitary female mammal nor a pubescent or virgin girl could procreate and that sexual intercourse was necessary.” (69) However, with the autonomization of power and the development of patriarchy from the Neolithic period onwards, men were no longer content to be fertilisers; they seized the power of women in order to reinforce autonomising power in their favour and justify it. In so doing, because of the ever-increasing separation from the rest of nature associated with this autonomisation, they were no longer cognisant of their place within it, and this gave rise to a questioning that they made the whole species bear. However, with the invasion of artificialisation, this question is becoming increasingly evanescent. Hence the immense magnitude of the inversion to be carried out.

What prevents us from grasping the significance of what happened is not the massive time span that separates us from our Paleolithic ancestors, but above all the break with the rest of nature and all the resulting separations that we have studied in previous chapters. We can add that this break and these separations induced in the species – especially in men – the desire to be recognised by nature. The inexorability of the desire for recognition is re-enacted within all individuals. The implacability of this phenomenon and its deleterious dimension derives from the fact that it is the cause of outbursts of violence and the dynamics of enmity.

The development of the madness of Homo sapiens leads to a risk of extinction that operates at the same time as its being blocked in relation to dereliction, dependence, guilt. It is therefore linked to an immense crisis of presence which is reinforced by the need for recognition. To free itself from a nightmare – from a psychic entity that has haunted it unconsciously for millennia, and which has operated at the basis of the wandering of the species itself determined by its desire to escape it – the species will be led, in a largely unconscious dynamic, to rediscover its naturalness. Thus, the starting point for a different kind of becoming allowing an inversion will present itself as an enormous return of the repressed: the naturalness of the species within its elements and components. What will impose itself, much more than "a movement which abolishes the order of things," will be an inversion manifesting itself as an emersion.⁸

Over and above the vast amount of time that separates us from our distant ancestors, the contribution of Nathalie Rouquerol's study is to enable us to renew a continuity with them and even with the potential that was asserted during the emergence of Homo sapiens, and thus to help us restore our naturalness. She writes: “La Dame de Lespugue is not subservient to any era, to any culture, she belongs to all of them, as we will show ..." (95.)

The statue of the La Dame de Lespugue had to be handled to reveal, through touch, the story inscribed within it, a full expression of the link between gesture and speech. At the same time it bears witness to the fact that this tactile sense is one of continuity, within being and within nature, that operates as a basis for all the other senses by the very fact that they enable us to be in contact with reality, without forgetting its exploratory dimension both in children and adults.⁹

Handling could have worked as a way of warding off the risk of extinction, linked above all, at the time, to successive glaciations, and therefore to ensure the perpetuation of the species. Today we are faced with a possible extinction due to our own activity; even if there are extra-human causes. Our perpetuation is linked to the jettisoning of a deadly dynamic – a jettisoning all the more difficult to achieve as it was partly generated as a result of a more or less obsessive and unconscious feeling of having been abandoned (dereliction) by nature – and to the putting into place, not of a simple warding-off, but an inversion. From the deployment of this (initially weak) and the consequent becoming of Homo gemeinwesen, an immense future opens up that we must apprehend not in relation to time but in relation to eternity. The species cannot be eternal and cannot be immortal because of the very fact that it depends on phenomena that will also have an end, such as the lifespan of the solar system. Not having an immediatist temporal approach allows us to conceive of the beyond of our presence in the cosmos and thus to be able to still affirm our deep reality which constitutes the content of our invariance: being in continuity with all forms of life, and our jouissance which "asserts itself in the joy of living invariance within becoming." ¹⁰

Translated by Howard Slater
Original text at http://www.revueinvariance.net/devenir1.html