Chapter 8: Genius

Language speaks through humans far more than humans speak through language.

We believe we name the world, but it is the verb that, slowly, laboriously, names the human. Its mutations do not belong to grammar but to geology: they obey subterranean pressures, collisions of cultural continents, erosions and millennial sedimentations of cultural exchange. Language is an organism whose evolution sketches the secret cartography of our relation to the sacred—neither a dead language nor a living one, but a language in perpetual re-generation.

Plunge into the depths of the primordial mud to grasp the Indo-European root of one of the most wondrous and ancient words that speaks of us, the "folk": gen-, meaning "to bring forth," "to beget." From this radical spring derivations as diverse as "generate," "genealogy," "genetic," "gender," or "genus," the stock of "lineage," itself giving rise to "genitor," "genitrix," "generation," and even to "knee"—for the gesture of placing a child upon a father's knees signified social birth. Here gen- is still a purely vital force, an unpersonified principle of germination that will be taken up to define the unit of transmission of the living: the "gene." And it is this vital principle that qualifies the first of the books of the Pentateuch: Creation is Genesis.

From the genus of lineage was born the Roman Genius. This spark was not a major deity but a tutelary spirit, intimate and familial. Every man was born with his own—an invisible breath that watched over his destiny, inspired him, connected his tiny life to the great divine whole. The Genius was the personal echo of the cosmic sonar (the spirit) of each individual, oscillating between the hunger of existence and the ether of the sacred. It was not humanity's creation but its birth companion, its celestial double.

History could have stopped there. But spiritual selection—life's slow work upon concepts—operated an alchemical transmutation. The Genius, an external spirit, was introjected. Contaminated by the Arabic djinn, the Roman Genius underwent a decisive semantic mutation at the Renaissance: from external tutelary spirit, it became an internal quality—modern "genius," that prodigious capacity of the individual to create. The personal god became the brilliant individuality.

This semantic drift is no mere accident. It is the very pattern of secularization, like the word "enthusiasm": from the Greek en-theos, "to have a god within oneself," it today commonly designates a simple personal fervor. "Inspiration": originally the breath of the muses in the poet's ear, it often reduces to an "idea" germinating from the mind.

Language is the living fossil of the sacred: in it we discover through philological archaeology a God engendered by the earth, projected by song, captured by scriptures, before being metabolized with secularization. Its nutrients redistributed in the blood of contemporary individualism offer an unprecedented autonomy and power. They nourished the Enlightenment—brilliant men as once only light itself was brilliant before it designated God (from the Indo-European root dei- meaning "day" or "light"). The new geniuses rose upon the ruins of ancient myths to announce a renewal of history, whether expressed in the most faithful impulse to the spirit of justice, knowledge, and freedom… or in its most totalitarian drift.

As humans dissect life and genius, vertigo seizes them: they identify within themselves flaws, varieties, weaknesses, imperfections they perceive as obstacles to their greatness, risks of "degeneration." Conquering humans will name the "indigenous" (those born in place) to differentiate them from their "congeners," to enslave, displace, and hierarchize them. In the will to correct itself, humanity perverts the very root that defines it. Thus from gen-, which sings of birth and lineage, will seep, at the end of the nineteenth century, "eugenics"—the set of doctrines and practices aimed at improving the human species through selection of hereditary traits. The distinction between those "well-born" and "the others" gives rise to policies of mass sterilization at the beginning of the twentieth century, then passes the baton to the absolute lexical monster: "genocide." This cold, juridical neologism is the perfect antithesis of Genius. Where Genius connected, fertilized, and inspired, genocide separates, sterilizes, and annihilates. This deviation is not a simple etymological paradox; it is history's solemn warning. The interiorization of the sacred is a perilous balance. The divine germinating within us can nourish or poison. To confuse permanent gestation—this symbiotic and cyclical process between the laws of humus and spiritual selection—with a selfish digestion seeking only to "purify" the species by rejecting its shadowy parts is to intoxicate oneself.

Today we perhaps live the final act of lexical metamorphosis. "Genius" is undergoing its most radical mutation, its greatest emancipation or its most total betrayal: so-called "generative" artificial intelligence, born precisely from humanity's technical language, claims to embody the spirit's new power. It is not a Genius; it is an automaton. It is not born from the humus of cultures and forgetting; it is extruded from calculation and data. Its verb is not inspired; it is predictable. It proposes words that function, not words that fertilize. It is not carnal; it is algorithmic. It seeks not to connect to the sacred but to optimize the real. By domesticating language, reducing it to code without shadow or silence, it sanitizes the mystery that is the very sap of invocation. It is genius externalized in a machine but emptied of its essence, promising us a flawless world and its most perfect earthly double: the Second Human—genius not liberated but uprooted, immaculate, without crack or mold.

At the sources of the human epic, another founding name springs from Indo-European history: "Prometheus." He did not steal fire to give it to humans. He restored the genius they had abdicated in favor of a distant Olympus that had broken with the roots and heritage of Gaia. The true Prometheus is not a model for AI; he is its most scathing accusation. AI brings back no fire, no light, "generates" nothing; it merely manages the combustions of a world it does not understand.

The story of Prometheus, the "Forethinker," is not a myth but a prophecy—that of the first Second Human gnawed by regret who seeks at all costs to turn back: Prometheus the "Nostalgic." Chained to his rock (the earth he has exploited), his liver eternally devoured and regenerated (the endless consumption of resources), he is condemned by Zeus to a sterile immortality. He embodies the horror of an "impossible return to humanity"—a genius torn from its earthly double who can neither die nor be forgotten, nor therefore make way for something new. He is the perfect antithesis of the law of humus.

Unbound from his chains by Hercules, his exact opposite, Prometheus dreams neither of victory nor of vengeance.

We must imagine Prometheus not as a brilliant hero but as an exhausted titan, dreaming of dying as a man and being forgotten.