In the work of Raymond Lulle, there is a very original conception of speech which he called "affatus". For him, this speech was a sixth sense peculiar to humans, and it was through it that he had, crucially, a relationship with God. Based...
moreIn the work of Raymond Lulle, there is a very original conception of speech which he called "affatus". For him, this speech was a sixth sense peculiar to humans, and it was through it that he had, crucially, a relationship with God. Based on this intuition and in light of the Lacanian approach, which holds that there is no unconsciousness except in a subject who speaks, the author tries to show that the transition (in light of the Darwinian theory of evolution) between the group of higher primates and the most primitive humans, those of the hunters-gatherers' Urkultur, can only be understood by the human access to speech and symbolic function. This implies language-signifying, entry into narcissism, and the enactment of hallucination as the "dream world", a place of ghosts and mythical ancestors, half-human and half-animal, omnipresent in the primitive horizon. Against all the reigning ideologies of geneticists, neuro-cerebral sciences, ethologists, and other sociobiologists, who continue to write that humans are merely slightly more evolved primates than chimpanzees, the link between speech and the manifestations of the unconscious, such as visions, trances, possessions, and somnambulistic Pythian speech, classical forms of religion associated with myths and rites, shows that "only religion can reveal the secret of man" as René Girard writes. In the conflict between Darwinian evolutionists and fundamentalist creationists, it is not a matter of denying the Darwinian theory of evolution, but of seeing that there is still a rupture and in this sense a certain creationism in the hominization process. As Jacques Lacan wrote, "there is no unconscious except in a subject who speaks" and "nothing in the animal world represents the subject". By pushing the Lacanian linguistic understanding of S. Freud's work to its limits, it turns out that Freud's metapsychology reveals a human whose psychology has no relation to that of the animal, even a higher primate, since it structures invocative (listening-speaking) and scopical (seeing and exhibition) partial impulses, fetish-narcissistic partial impulses as well as necrophilic-zoophilic partial impulses. If these typically human partial impulses appeared "aberrant" to S. Freud, it was because he assumed as an "a priori" that human psychology had to be based on animal instinctuality (a mistaken axiom of scientism). We know that a positivist like Gabriel Tarde theorized that humans were social beings grafted onto animal beings. However, this is not the case, and J. Lacan showed that the drive (Trieb) in psychoanalysis was not identifiable with the instincts of ethologists (Instinkt). Just as Christopher Columbus believed he had reached Cathay (China) but had actually discovered a new territory, S. Freud discovered a whole new domain specifically human and in rupture with animality, but it was only J. Lacan, among Freudian psychoanalysts, who succeeded in reformulating it by linking the unconscious with language and the symbolic function (the phallic function). Claude Lévi-Strauss could write that "science had rendered the world mute" and it is because modern humans have gagged the speech of the Other, depotentiated the unconscious soul, and substituted themselves for the Other (God) that they maintain this ridiculous proximity between humans and animals. However, this is not honest because the joint to be made in the process of hominization is between a group of higher primates and a most primitive human group, such as hunter-gatherers and their Urkultur, knowing that the most archaic religious form is shamanism with the importance given to ecstatic trances in which the returning ancestors and mythical figures that populate the "world of dreams" manifest themselves. Therefore, we can see that only the novelty of the symbolic function, namely speech and language-signifying in connection with hallucination and transference to the Other, allows us to understand this passage from the higher primate to the fundamentally religious primitive human.