“Such astounding butts… I didn’t draw it very well on the board, but it was to give you an impression. That’s how a prehistoric Venus is composed. That doesn’t at all mean what paleontologists imagine, that they were like that. The representative of the representation was different for them than it is for us. It wasn’t a balloon or two, nor any the more was it the invocation of the breasts of Tiresias – “Fly away, birds of weakness…” For them, the representative of the representation was assuredly like that. This proves to you that the representative of the representation can be different according to the times.” Lacan J, The Seminar, Book XVIII, D’un Autre à l’autre, Paris, Seuil, 2006, p. 228.
Lacan draws a prehistoric Venus to give us an impression of it, namely, an imprint that eludes reasoning since the object is unrepresentable. At the dawn of the sublimation: two hundred and forty-four paleolithic treasures, discovered over an area spanning Siberia right up to the Atlantic, seem to reduce the woman to her lures. Named Venus, by analogy with the goddess, one dreams of her in accordance with the canons of the beauty of the era. Nomination, the index of the paleontologist’s dream: Venus Impudica for the first discovery, Venus of Lespugue, Venus of Moravany, Venus of Willendorf… The Venus of Brassempouy makes for an exception because this realistic representation of the human face, among the earliest known, is without mouth and without body! But once the birds of weakness have flown away, how to know if this representation is male or female?
Translated by Samya Seth