This poster focuses on the work we have realized in occasion of the Open Days ofthe Laboratory ‘Art and Languages’ – Table n. 2, concerning the ‘theme of the origins of humanity’. Our goal is to investigate the relationship between the research on the human origins and the book Death Instinct and Knowledge by Massimo Fagioli and the Human Birth Theory, with emphasis on how they are strictly related to each other through two essential aspects, the ‘language ofimages’ and the preverbal communication. We will highlight that there is a healthy birth since the beginning of human history, which reminds us to the ‘preverbal period’ of newborn-child, namely to the first year of life, theorized by MassimoFagioli in his book Death Instinct and Knowledge.
The prehistoric age may be seen as the childhood of humanity, characterized by a ‘thought expressing itself through images’ without words – a long period of human history that is founded and based on affections and sounds, which are both present in child-woman relationship, as evidenced in cave paintings and in all prehistoric art. In addressing the issue of the origins of humanity, when our human ancestors had not yet developed capacity for language, we will follow the idea that human ontogeny summarizes phylogeny. Hence, the common belief for which one would become a human being only when capacity for language and writing are fully developed is being overturned.
The first steps of humanity, which were characterized by a civilization without wars and a nomadic way of life of our ancestors who inhabited the caves, provideus with essential information and lead us to change our paradigm: the human being is primarily a social being, she/he is rebellious to nature, she/he is an artist. In this context, the woman emerges as the first artist in history. At the origins of humanity, our species faced their existence by filling the worldwith useless things and objects, such as paintings, sculptures, ornaments, soundsand gestures, which were not helpful for their survival, but were necessary to express themselves through an emotional and imaginative movement with the silent language of images. The latter is also considered the language of dreams, the universal language of human birth, which is the characteristic of human identity. The artists recreate that preverbal period linked to the ‘civilization of images’,which taps into the unconscious, by making a non-conscious movement that arises when they separate themselves from their inner situations (namely, the ‘disappearance fantasy’ explained in the book Death Instinct and Knowledge) and the world around them. They recreate the silence at birth, which is line and fantasy.
Then, we will deal with the ‘dreamlike unconscious image’, but also with the ‘not-dreamlike unconscious image’, while being awake.
The line of the drawings of Chauvet, Latmos and Porto Badisco joins that of all theartists in history – painters, poets, writers and musicians. The artists realize with the line what could represent the truest and deepest identity of a human being, i.e. the irrational thought. A creativity that is the foundation of human beings’ identity, and that is not a divine work. After, in a time that is difficult to estimate, as religion and logos appeared, the annulment of the world of images (for a definition of ‘annulment pulsion’ see Death Instinct and Knowledge) and the split between images and language, between conscious and non-conscious, occurred. We will hypothesize that all thatmight have been originated from a crisis of the man caused by woman’s creativity.
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