To return to continuity is to find the obvious

We will not deal with the question in its entirety, but we will focus on what seems to us to be essential and which has neither been dealt with at all in Emergence of Homo Gemeinwesen or, if so, only insufficiently.¹  It should be noted that climatic conditions are a determining factor for everything that happens during the Neolithic period when the enslavement of women took place. Indeed, without global warming causing major changes in the flora, the implementation and the realization of the sedentary life, which had already started at the end of the Paleolithic, could not have taken place. Everything begins with sedentarisation.

The relations between men and women occupy the central place in the becoming of the species because in the last instance it is this which determines everything. In previous chapters we have shown how the introduction of new practices had more or less modified these relations and had even caused imbalances that could be compensated for. Separation could be curbed [enraye]. However, to really understand the changes in these relationships it is necessary to take into account the presence of the child and to consider the relationship between the mother-child couple ‒ especially during the initial phase of the child's life − and the man (the father). This is why we attach great importance to the use of initiation during the development of hunting (c.f. Chapter 7), because, with this practice, the mother-child relationship is called into question as there is no longer an immediacy within the community, but rather the deployment of a "cultural" dynamic that imposes a second birth which is proof that the child really is a part of the community. At the same time, it is the first break between the mother and the child as well as within the process of the child’s life as it reaches the adult stage. It is as if the break from the mother, a break in immediacy, were necessary for this stage to be reached.

During the development of hunting, prohibitions and alliances are put in place […] This allows-for an autonomization of power because the infraction of the prohibition corresponds, for the one who commits it, to a freeing-up of power which is conducive to the production of the individual. This contributes to the weakening of the community. All of this has an impact on the process of knowledge which similarly begins to undergo a certain autonomization in that it will allow − in particular by means of the emergence of the concepts of ‘pure’ and ‘impure’ ‒ the activity of the community to be interpreted in a way that justifies the self.

In terms of power dynamics, it is important to note that with the deployment of hunting the prerogatives of the two sexes diverge. Thus, women could participate in hunting − by being beaters, for example ‒ but they could not kill. This can be understood (and was understood) in terms of menstrual blood and all that goes along with it.²  In fact, this is an understatement: women were not allowed to kill. The power to do so was taken away from them. Women have the power to beget but not to kill. Woman is the being-for-life to which her power is linked. Man is the being-for-death to which his power is linked. And power is the ensemble of the possibilities that one possesses in order to realize the modalities of the process of life. Power is linked to an affirmation which, when enmity is absent, does not encroach upon others. This is fundamental because subsequently a power-over will be imposed, which also implies intervention, manipulation, constraint. It is a power which is exerted over another’s power so that this other does not deviate from a given process.

Due to the existence of haptogestation, the mother-child relation implies the affirmation of a profound continuity which means that we can say that the woman tends to develop according to continuity while having the dimension of the discontinuous. Man develops predominantly from the pole of discontinuity while having the dimension of the continuous. The becoming of the species took place according to a tension between continuity and discontinuity. This is another way of saying that it took place as "confrontation" between man and woman. But not only … as shown by the various movements of reaction against an out-of-nature-becoming within which men occupied a central place […]

Thus, for millennia, in relation to variations in climatic conditions there has been a differentiation in the manifestations of the process of life of men and women without there being an effective separation of the sexes but only a tendency towards this (as occurred at the time when hunting and the problematic of magic were being developed.) To be more precise, because separation was incomplete this was only virtual³  as the existence of the sexes does not presuppose separation. In other words, men and women were able to live together, each one of them carrying out the life process according to their own being. There was complementarity and continuity.

Everything changes in the Neolithic era because of the establishment of a set of phenomena that can be grouped together and expressed as follows: the separation of the species from the rest of nature; a fundamental break at the base of separation that served to intensify the separations that followed. This is established by the fact that a given community – by appropriating a portion of territory in order to cultivate it and raise animals – cuts itself off from the rest of nature. This generates the dynamic of enmity and shutting-in [enfermement] that tends to replace empathy and which accompanies the autonomisation of power as it accedes to the status of a manipulable and cumulative quantum which is no longer an expression of a power-of-being but of a power-over-others. Love became secondary. From then on men and women no longer related to each other according to their power [of being], but via a quantum of power that they had monopolized. And all this without the persisting naturalness of love without which relation is impossible. Thus, megalomania arose.

Women’s discovery of agriculture and pottery as well as their role in animal husbandry increased their power (their quantum of power.) But this is not all. They encroached on the domain of men. In fact, agrarian practices led them to exercise a sovereignty over life as well as over death and as a result of the deployment of a megalomaniac dimension they posed as "mistresses of the animals" as if they were extending their power to beget children to that of producing animals. At the same time this introduced a confusion between what was devolved to women and what was devolved to men. From here, following an outgrowth [transcroissance] and autonomisation of power, the power of women came to function as a power-over that of men. The latter, in some way, were maintained in an infantile state, in a state of dependence, of inferiority; a new state resulting from the break in continuity, causing a weakening of haptogestation and of the perception of the power of the child as an expression of continuity.⁴

Men, therefore, feeling threatened (reactivation of an ancient imprint), threw themselves fully into production and, to this end, developed various techniques and tools, especially thanks to metallurgy (end of the Neolithic era), which enabled them to temper their confusion by establishing and accentuating a separation between men and women with the establishment and institutionalisation of the sexes; that is to say, by resorting to an objective fact, to an anatomical marker, that was raised to the rank of an indicator of separation:  sex − the etymology of which is in close relation with the idea of the latter, as well as its being affected from the outset with a strong ideological dimension ‒ is the source of a deep ambiguity. This ideological dimension of the superiority − replacing inferiority ‒ of the male sex,⁵  attributed to them a physical and especially intellectual superpower which aimed at counterbalancing, even supplanting, that of the engendering characteristics of women.

This ideological superiority would derive above all from how men would escape from a dependence on nature by virtue of separation […]  while women, by remaining ‘natural,’ would remain dependent. This is why the becoming of the species, divided and dominated by men, will come to consist of an ever-greater separation to ward-off this dependence. Simultaneously − because of the desire not to lose what we have become separated from ‒ there would arise an intense development of creation, an artificial surrogacy; the expression of an immense megalomania.

So, after a period of balance between the sexes, the predominance of men was imposed, especially, let us recall, through the technical advances of ploughing, irrigation and metallurgy. Consequently, the productive power of men was opposed to the engendering power of women. But this was neither sufficient to fulfil men’s desire for power nor to appease their megalomania. Not being satisfied with manipulating the power of animals, they wanted to seize the engendering power of women and to substitute themselves for it. The impossibility of such a usurpation led to their contesting the possession of the child which, from being an expression of the capacity to beget, was raised-up [érige] as a symbol of power. With the instauration of patriarchy, the child is finally recognised as a new being only when the father accepts it, adopts it, takes it in his arms and displays it to the members of what has become the family. From here the terrible dynamic of the mother-child separation is set in motion. This initiates the process of the repression of the child’s naturalness; a separation that greatly increases with the emergence of capital as it replays another break in continuity. Whilst men broke with nature, women, dispossessed, fell back on their natural function, on their maternity,⁶  “subjugating themselves” to nature and − faithful to their need for a sedentary lifestyle − to the oïkos as it replaced the topos.

The subjugation of women is closely connected to the separation from nature and the productive work of men. The victory of the latter is closely related to a terrible repression which resulted in the confinement of women in slavery and in voluntary servitude (the most infamous being that of the Ancient Greek gynaeceum.) I deliberately use the expression ‘voluntary servitude’ (which contains a mystification) as it suggests that the indefinite maintenance of a constraint could generate a servile habit that becomes wilful. This repression was carried out thanks to the dissolution of the community and the replacement of the old communal relations with relations of dependence vis-à-vis the development of the economy and the first form of the State; instruments par excellence of substitution. All this establishes patriarchy and the full realization of the enslavement of women. This was therefore carried out at the same time as the break with the rest of the nature became intensified. One can go as far as to affirm that this break came first and that subsequently women became a symbol of an incomprehensible nature that men saw as something to subjugate. Therefore, man grew more and more ignorant of his place in nature. This is a fundamental point because the subjugation of women was imposed as an inseparable correlate of the will to dominate nature which itself is linked to warding-off the threat of extinction.

So, at least in the West, we have had the establishment of patriarchy. Yet, male domination has also taken hold in other zones of the globe which do not know the State. It operates in despotic communities, the final phase in the development of the community before the emergence of the State.⁷  There are also regions – such as Çatal Hüyük or Crete – where the importance of women survived and in which they have retained an independence as well as a significant power. But this did not last and patriarchy was finally imposed thanks to, as in other regions, the intervention of the patriarchal pastoralist peoples. This is what, amongst other theoreticians, Marija Gimbutas affirms. However, the origin of patriarchy is not revealed in her work and, in particular, she does not ask why the Indo-Europeans were patriarchal. The latter are often used as a deus-ex-machina to explain various social upheavals.⁸  

In my opinion, Jacques Cauvin also overlooks the clash between men and women which ended in the establishment of male power. It is not the place here to set out the content of his book⁹  because it would first be necessary to specify from what point one can speak of gods and goddesses. For me, this is only possible with the emergence of the State at the beginning of historical time. However, Chapter 7 of his book, ‘The Neolithic Revolution: A Mental Mutation,’¹⁰  is relevant to our theme. Indeed, he specifies what this mutation consists of: "An event occurred, and it is of a psychical nature. We defined it as a new rending within the human imaginary between a ‘top’ and a ‘bottom’, between an order of the personified and dominating divine force and that of a daily humanity whose internal effort towards such a transcendent perfection can be symbolised by the raised arms of the orans.”¹¹  The ‘rending’ results from the increasing separation from nature, an important "discontinuation," and from the break in continuity between men and women that is generative of the concepts of superiority and inferiority in order to express the dependence of one sex on another as well as that of the species with regard to the invisible world which is going to be populated with various hypostases. The enslavement of women clearly corresponds to an organic and mental rending but cannot be reduced to Cauvin’s suggested ‘mutation’ as this latter concept connotes the idea of a phenomenon imposing itself in a sudden way whereas the enslavement of women required millennia, the whole neolithic, to be realized.

Finally, there are still zones today where women are not dominated.¹²  But we cannot speak of matriarchy, a term created to designate the absence of male leadership in certain communities, as is the case among the Na of China,¹³  where a significant separation between the sexes prevails and where men are in fact dependent, as has happened even more clearly in the communities of the Amazons from which they are absent except at the moment of reproduction. This is proof of the power at play in the clash between the sexes.

Whether, at this time, there is patriarchy or not, the separation of the sexes has occurred. It becomes a source of stagnation for the species, its shutting-in. To overcome separation, love became the essential mediation in order to reach union, another expression of the loss of continuity and the autonomization of power. It also becomes a mediator to establish continuity, but also the loss of immediacy: we love because we are separated. From there another dynamic emerges, in some way complementary, but which will unfold later: that of dominating sexuality which is a variant of that of dominating nature.

The exaltation of love, especially if it can be experienced in a natural way, is the subject of an immense world-wide literature which operates like an incantation, a conjuring-away of a curse so as to overcome the love-hate ambiguity. Thus, Tristan and Isolde love each other, not by naturalness, but because they drank the philtre, and it is as if the beverage had allowed them to overcome the fear of women. From this we can say that art appears as immensely therapeutic for the human psyche in that it allows us to overcome or integrate the various traumas that have occurred during the last millennia. The emergence of art is inseparable from that of the State which also has a therapeutic dimension.¹⁴  The same investigation is valid for religion. Moreover, it is worth noting that in these three cases women, often exalted, are used as mediators; another expression of ambiguity.

As a result of the deployment of enmity, the enslavement of women − justified by their so-called dependence on nature and by their so-called physical and intellectual inferiority − is accompanied by a rejection of innateness. Doing and becoming become preponderant and therefore so do work and progress. This has repercussions for the process of a knowledge that must justify the break, the separation and therefore the regression from immediacy. This is a form of knowledge which authorises the denial, the manipulation of the reality of human beings both on the social level and on the inter-individual level. This also concerns the relationship to the invisible which is no longer experienced in continuity with the visible but as a separate sphere where the manipulation of the hypostases that populate it can also take place. In order to feel safe men have actually restricted their living environment, their oikos. They have locked themselves in. Therefrom we can say that the dynamics of enclosure and shutting-in become dominant and condition the becoming of the species: in cities, cemeteries, temples, churches, nations, the various communities, in the family and in the individual which, with the blooming of hyper-individualism [encloses us within ourselves.]

The separate can be posited as a fullness that can manifest itself as an invisible that must be explored, populated and manipulated in such a way that we can think that the ‘shutting-in’ of the species within itself ‒ its madness − implies an immense void wherein it hopes to found an alternative to its risk of becoming extinct. Hence a constant increase in the artificialisation of the world whose repercussions actualise another form of possible extinction, while the void is expressed through the rejection and destruction of nature. Let us clarify: the invisible can initially be perceived as the elusive, the indiscernible, the indefinable and can be apprehended as a void whose other dyadic component is the full [plein]. From then on, one understands the manipulations which can be carried out. Thus, the dominants, to increase the effectiveness of their power so as it will not be called into question, tend to render it invisible. On the other hand, to deny qualities to an individual, as has been done to women, amounts to emptying them of substance. Patriarchal power denied women human qualities and thus justified male dominance. Now, silence can be compared to emptiness in the sense that it designates an absence-of. We then understand the insistence of the dominants to impose silence in order to maintain their domination, and here too, patriarchal power operated in the same way.¹⁵

The dominated, in order to escape the maleficence of power and to be elusive want to make themselves invisible (things are more complex with silence.) We can extend this to the species and say that it would like to make itself invisible to escape the threat of extinction: hence its shutting-in.

To specify, let’s express it in a different way by noting a behavioural ambiguity that becomes a contradiction. Men have posited themselves as a fullness whose complementary emptiness would be constituted by women. Hence the attempt to make them invisible as the best way to ward-off the threat they represent for men.¹⁶  This threat is all the greater because of their reputed power of seduction, which supposedly makes them great manipulators. However, when it is a question of exploring the invisible, men appeal to women – as clairvoyants – thereby proving that it is impossible to extirpate naturalness, to do without women, and the failure of all the manipulations dictated by megalomania¹⁷  in order to conceal them.

This enslavement was, as we have mentioned, accompanied by an [ideological] justification. However, we would like to add the following: it made it possible to flee the sedentary life, analogous to fleeing from dependence, women being ‘conservative’ because they are tied-to nature, and to exalt the dynamics of intervention leading to the now predominant dynamic of innovation whose final result could well be that of the extinction of the species because of a substitution leading to the artificialisation of human beings.

With the enslavement of women and the struggle against it, as well as the attempt to overcome the conflict between men and women by denying the sexes and natural reproduction, the species enters into wandering, into the production of ontosis and speciosis which culminates in its madness.

However, this is not the most essential in that, with the end of patriarchy, there is the disappearance of a set of norms that regulate the relations between the sexes, that is to say the domination of women by men, because this domination no longer constitutes one of the foundations of the State whose representatives proclaim the equality of the sexes and want to see this reach fruition. The enslavement of women fades even if the violence against women persists.

In order to understand this we need to return to the phenomenon of separation which caused a gradual, continuous regression of haptogestation and therefore a slow deterioration in the well-being of children. First of all, the fragmentation of the community leads to a decrease in cohesion among women making it difficult for them to have their babies carried permanently by each other. The separation of the dyads and therefore the establishment of the sexes has a further negative effect on haptogestation, especially as it effects the dyads themselves, which is to say that each individual potentially includes the complementary dimension of the other sex i.e. a male having a feminine capacity and vice versa. Differences became a point of accusation which led to an impoverishment in the power of being and tended to rigidify the relations between men and women, between parents and children. This was yet another cause for the decline of haptogestation.

This becomes even more acute when the child becomes a symbol of power and therefore an object of contestation. And this is further worsened with the creation of an artificialized world following the slow substitution of human relations by economic and power relations vis-a-vis the emergence of the State in its first form. From then on the need arises to have the child adapt to an artificial world which implies repressing its naturalness so that it is compatible with this world and can develop in it. Such is the origin of the repression of the naturalness of the child exerted, “for its own good,” by the parents.¹⁸  This is often not deliberately willed by the parent and is initially imposed by the despotic community and then by the State. As a result, the mother comes to be perceived as an ambiguous being who is both beneficient (full of love) and maleficent (guilty of inducing dependence.) This founds a hatred of mothers which in the adult state becomes, among men, a hatred of women often coupled with a misogynistic fear that induces self-hatred in women. This misogyny is often reinforced by the fact that to escape from ambiguity, which is too difficult to live with, human beings choose enmity as this is the dimension which is most compatible with social development.

This is what gave rise to the ‘misfortune’ [malencontre] of which Étienne de La Boétie speaks in his The Discourse of Voluntary Servitude. The ‘misfortune’ that “has been able to denature man, the only creature really born to live freely and has made him lose the memory of his first being, as well as the desire to return to it..." From this, in order to explain what he calls voluntary servitude he affirms "the first reason why men serve voluntarily is that they are born serfs and are raised in servitude." Now, as we have already pointed out, in different languages the same word is used to designate both ‘child’ and ‘serf’ because both are dependent beings. Slave is also the adjective for woman, since she too lives in dependence. We have also pointed out to what extent the dynamics of dispensing with the dependence towards nature (itself ambiguously posed as mother and stepmother) determines the becoming of the species especially from the time of the Neolithic. To conclude let us say that all this occurs as if men and women lived a voluntary servitude whereas it was imposed on them and from which they have tried to free themselves. The moment of ‘misfortune’ occurs at the time of the break from the rest of nature.

We have already extensively discussed how to get out of this terrible becoming leading to the extinction of the species: inversion which consists fundamentally in a reconciliation with nature, therefore with women recognized in all their power. The reaffirmation of their naturalness is fundamental especially during childbirth¹⁹  because of the decisive consequences this has for the naturalness of the child. It is from here that everything begins... and that inversion can be realized.

Translated by Howard Slater
Original text at http://www.revueinvariance.net/asservissement%2520.html