Body, technologies and devices at Alejandro Jodorowsky.

The cycles of La Caste des Méta-Barons and Technopères

Denis Mellier

The cycle of La Caste des Méta-Barons (2011) and that of Technopères (2014) represent a set of more
than a thousand pages to which would be added the two albums concerning the Castaka family, whose
gesture precedes the adventures of the Méta-Barons. , as well as the five albums that make up the
Megalex series (2009). These are part of a graphic and imaginary continuity with the themes and forms
developed in the two series which will be discussed here. The two cycles are spread over eight albums
each; La Caste des Méta-Barons was published from 1992 to 2004 [2], Les Technopères from 1998 to
2006. The productions of these two cycles therefore partially overlap and the publisher, Les
Humanoïdes Associés, in the paratexts of the volumes, the critical notices. Current trends, like
Jodorowsky in many interviews, emphasize the community of fictional universes in similar or parallel
worlds. The complete edition of La Caste des Méta-Barons (2011) specifies that the cycle of L’Incal
that Jodorowsky published with Moebius in six albums from 1981 to 1988 is also located in this same
universe. The last Meta-Baron, Nameless, first appears in the Incal cycle, as well as more briefly in
Before the Incal. Jodorowsky developed or increased the consistency of his fictional universe by
weaving the stories between them and by extending, for example, the adventures of his antihero John
Difool, a cowardly and selfish detective, in a Avant L'Incal from 1988 to 1995 with Zoran Janjetov , the
designer of Technopères, an After Incal with Moebius (2000) and Ladrönn (2011 and 2014), and three
albums with Ladrönn which constitute Final Incal (from 2008 to 2014).

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Translation results
By quickly recalling these data, it is not a question of engaging this subject in a transfictional reading
of Jodorowsky's characters, nor of appealing to a meta-baronic erudition wishing to articulate the
avatars, the chronologies and the places between them. , the degrees of inclusion of the worlds, their
logical, imaginary, metaphysical and mystical relationships. From such a perspective, it would then be
necessary to appeal not only to other albums in which their original creator participates more or less
directly, such as Les Armes du Méta-Baron (2008) or Méta-Baron, written by screenwriter Jerry Frissen
and drawn by Valentin Sécher and Niko Henrichon and whose publication began in 2015, with six
volumes to date. But it would also be necessary, and much more broadly, to summon entire sections of
Jodorowsky's protean work in order to show the double play of starry and coherence. Such a circulation
between the albums would then clearly show the joint effects of repetition and reformulation, of the
variation and of the constancy of great figures or obsessions, the origins of which are moreover often
identified by their author in his article. biography itself [3]. They characterize the writings and films of
Jodorowsky, and to evoke only the most salient of them, it would be possible to browse the cycles of
the Meta-Barons and the Technopères starting from questions of lineage and generation, of the meeting
lovers, cartomancy and alchemy, psychic experiences, the opening of consciousness under the mystical
thrust of drugs [4]. All these aspects of Jodorowsky's thought and imagination are declined in comic
strip scenarios, plays and volumes of poetry, in films that he makes, but also in novels or
autobiographical texts, in a series of authoritative writings on the Tarot of Marseilles, as well as in
essays whose list of titles clearly shows the spiritualist and mystical vocation of their author (Un
Évangile pour healer [2003], Le Dieu interior [2003], Cabaret Mystique [ 2008], Manual of
Psychomagic [2009]).
The cycles of the Meta-Barons and the Technopères are crossed by these themes and their dominant
figures: the first tells about the accomplishment of an ideal filiation in time, the other, a quest for
refoundation through sidereal space [ 5]. Drinking from the joint sources of the opera of space and the
heroic wonder, the visual universe, beyond the differences in graphic style of Gimenez, Janjetov and
Beltran, articulates between them the archaic and savage worlds, the hyper- technology and medieval,
barbarian or Asian martiality imaginaries - Frank Herbert and Kurosawa, if you will -, interstellar
immensities and mineral and vegetal materiality, the monstrosity of bodies and their fantasized
perfection, abstract representations of the interiority and the comic baroque of a machinic bric-a-brac,
the signs of the sublime and gigantism with the triviality of a very Bakhtinian carnival in the efficiency
of its degradations.

Rich and profuse in their scenaristic and graphic expressions, the great discursive constructions of
Jodorowsky's work impose themselves with force: religious syncretism, the imaginary of magical and
alchemical transubstantiation, the expansion of consciousness in drugs or sexuality are thematized in
the cycles which recount the confrontation between heroic valor (the Meta-Barons) or Messianism (the
Technopères) and the tyrannies of the political and technological rationalities of imperialism or global
capitalism, including the guild of pan-technos is hardly a cynical version. Thus of this seventieth verse
of the primary creed taught at the pan-techno pre-school of Don Mossino: "Without vanity and the
spirit of profit, without ambition and strength, without the taste for trade and deceit , the pan-techno
guild would not exist ”(2014: 42). As for the lesson that Albino will hear at the Penitentiary School of
Nohope from the mouth of Master Vergara, the techno-executioner, the dystopian allegory is specified
there, articulating digital video game culture, techno-economic rationality, compensatory virtuality
regime, oligarchic elite and decerebrate plebs:

Before creating games, you have to know who is going to buy them and how we are going to trick them
into getting caught in our sales nets. Non-Tech citizens in other words our customers, 90% of the
galactic population, don't know what they want. They are used to letting others make decisions for
them… They are stupidly happy with them. They accept the blows of fate as inevitable ... They do not
make plans for fear of criticism. Repress their sexual energy or waste it without transforming it into a
creative act… They live in the midst of negative emotions, fear, jealousy, hatred, revenge, greed,
laziness, anger… They seem kind, but deep down, they are assassins, and as they dare not kill those
they hate, they self-destruct little by little ... We must take advantage of their flaws and in a roundabout,
subliminal way, encourage them … The more he is a failure, the more the citizen will buy our games to
build a life of enjoyment and triumphs…

The aristocratic radicality of a heroic ethos in the Meta-Barons or the transcendent vision and
ecological utopia in The Technopères, which emancipate the consciousness and the life from the deadly
illusion of the masters of the game, allow Jodorowsky to develop in his fictions of allegories that are
both escapist and very precisely targeted at the critical level. We can easily read the technocritical
concerns about the real and the virtual, illusionism and video games, biopower and the governmentality
of devices, in an effect of synchrony with the Matrix pop-philosophy that spread at the time. We can
easily hear in Les Technopères, and in another cycle of Jodorowsky, Megalex (1999-2008), the
ecological anxieties in the face of the destruction of the natural world which lead to the resurgence of
original forces (water, earth, mud, stone, liana, etc.) to counter the political and technical arrogance of
human organizations. With the oceanic and macroscopic dimensions of the interstellar fresco
embracing the phylogenetic scope of the human adventure, Jodorowsky's scenarios confront, in
skilfully regulated scalar variations, more intimate motifs whose ontogenetic dynamics constitute the
motor of actions and stories: obsession descent, descent as continuity of caste, fusional union of man
and woman in an exceptional and exclusive couple, dualism of soul and body, and quest for
transcendence as the absolute realization of the subject occurring in the instant of its most complete
dissolution. This is accomplished in heroic death in the name of the paternal and martial ethos of the
Meta-Baron, or in the disembodiment and polymorphism of virtuality for Albino in The Technopères:
the latter being able to espouse all appearances, take all shapes, all bodily identities.

In this dense or loose, superficial or deep braiding, depending on the critical eye that one bears on the
coherence of Jodorowsky's discourse, the body imposes itself as the conflicting, exemplary and painful
interface of these clashes, of these negotiations. , of these aporias between the series of dualities that we
have quickly evoked. However, the bodies appear, unlike the two stories told in the Technoper cycle
and in The Caste of the Meta-Barons, as exaltations of the very power of the flesh and the bones, in the
sense of what makes one stand upright. organic assemblage or its increased variations. Whether one
transcends its limits through the ordeal of pain and mutilation as an expression of heroic virtu, or
whether one frees oneself from it in order to better find it by rising in spirituality whose
dematerialization then becomes the metaphor, the body is essential in the universe of Jodorowsky as
the major place of the fight for the supremacy of the ethical will and the spirit on the weakness, on the
illusions which constitute the sensitive world, and on the contingency .

Any bodily form asserts itself in Jodorowsky as the very figure of a transitory state which calls not for
mutation, that is to say access to another state, but indeed for going beyond, less transformation than
passage. increased at a stage of realization of the power that the subject discovers in him through his
evolution in the mastery of his dematerialization and his virtualization: thus of the case of Albino, the
paleoMoise of the wandering community of the 500,000 young technopers in quest for a planet where
to found the utopia of a new world. It is therefore not so much a question of evolving towards a neo-
corporality as of crossing the stages of a meta-corporality each time, in the process which leads from
the first Meta-Baron, Otho, to Sans-Nom, the latest. We can characterize this process at work in the two
cycles from four notions that do not strictly constitute the order of an exhibition or a progression, but a
theory of questions tracing a movement, points through which pass and which are linked to a reading
hypothesis: 1. Mutilation; 2. Increase; 3. Transubstantiation; 4. Neology.

Mutilation
“And mutilation became a major ingredient in the initiation of the Meta-Barons. (2011: 122) Once past
the first two pages devoted to establishing the extradiegetic level of storytelling, so opens the story of
the Meta-Barons: on the ceremony of mutilation. Losing a part of his body without batting an eyelid,
master of pain, consenting to the sacrifice, this is the test that fathers impose on sons before the
ultimate test which ensures the transmission of the title and which requires the son to face the father
and defeats him in a fight to the death. Thus the duel of Othon and his son Aghnar from which "was
born the most important tradition of the Castaka: a Meta-Baron considers himself initiated only when
he is able to kill his own father" (2011: 162).

Hegemony is at this price, competing versions cannot coexist and if we wanted to spin a computer
metaphor, we would have to say that uploads only work by overwriting the previous versions that
spawned and developed them. If mutilation is the principle of augmentation, it is because deprivation -
whether consented or not - gives way to the implantation of the same or the better. For the price of
consent and control, the implant offers a gain: it does not restore, but increases. That is to say, it is not
turned towards the repetition of the conditions of the past, but towards an improvement of the
conditions of a future made at the same time of projective anticipation and of contemporary technical
actualization. Augmentation is therefore not pro-thesis (pro: for what is missing, instead of), it is meta-
thesis: what goes beyond or more in depth, which doubles, duplicates, not in the identity, but in power
and movement. The increase is superlative, not a substitute. Mutilation is sacrificial in nature and only
makes sense in the promise of increased power and symbolic value.

Thus the systematic identification of the figures of mutilation in Jorodowsky's work would reveal its
haunting inscription as well as its variations (from La Montagne sacrée [1973] to the Bouncer [2001-]
drawn by Boucq). Even if the anthology and the exemplary are tempting, in substance, the modalities
of the apparatus represented in The Caste of the Meta-Barons hardly differ from their common forms in
the visual imagination of science fiction or space opera: perfect continuity of the original body and its
technological extensions, metabolization of the implant, most of the time of a metal that borders on
casting or liquidity (storlon, a flexible metal, is it specified in volume 7 [2011: 394]), ensure the visual
effect of a distinction, expose the heterogeneity of the part reported or added. They are the expression
of an absence of a break in continuity in a corporeality which has reached a stage clearly superior to the
previous state.

In Jorodowsky’s imagination of mutilation, there is a dialectic between monster and lack. When Baron
Othon Von Salza loses groin and hips in battle in the first volume of the cycle, Othon the great-
grandfather (2011: 57), nothing comes to invent a replacement penis reducing loss, a magical and
reconstructive surgery ensuring pleasure and descendants. It is a question of rethinking the forms and
functions of the absent organ, of making this absence the motor of a phallic power made up of martial
exceptionality, will and loyalty to the Caste ethos. Castration leaves a female socket in the Meta-
Baron's apparatus, who can then plug into it an all too transparent penile substitute: the handle by
which he guides his phallus vessel. The lack here reveals the process of augmentation, castration is a
double and paradoxical metaphor: it expresses the martial value and situates, in comparison with Otho's
enemies, virility in the quality of courage. Regarding pleasure and descent, Othon's beloved, Honorata
the three-grandmother (Volume 2, 1993), priestess Shabda-Oud, nun-whore and witch, succeeds thanks
to her magical powers by introducing a drop of the Otho's blood in her vagina to "a dazzling blue
explosion of Prana, the miraculous fertilization takes place ... Accompanied by an unspeakable
discharge of pleasure ... Typically organic phenomenon, which, I must admit, I envy them ..." ( 2011:
95), as Tonto, the cycle's robot narrator, recounts.

Increase

Lack and monster: because as smooth and efficient as the biomechanics are, it remains visible. No
illusion, therefore, no strangeness and Uncanny Valley, but no more teratological hyperbole.
Lovecraftian monsters with gaping holes, tentacles, outgrowths and appendages are found in abundance
in Jodorowsky and the designers have had a great time in the expressive effects of the figures of the
monstrous. Here, the monster is due to the exposure of its composite nature: the effect of naturalization
of the composition into a new continuity born of mutilation and augmentation redefines the status of
heterogeneity of assemblages into neo-homogeneity. This presupposes a redefinition of the relationship
between identity and otherness, the organic and the mechanical, the human and the material, the body
and the body's consciousness. The metaphors of the cyborg or the mutant can express this alteration: it
is to be understood here not as a lesser state relatively to the former, but as a process of access to a later
and other form. It must therefore be noted that, with Jodorowsky, we remain in the dialectic and the
synthesis of going beyond, the order of the meta, rather than in the proposition of the term third, of the
cyborg as hybridization in search of a form going beyond the dualisms of the sense in which Thierry
Hoquet (2011) thinks it in the continuity of Donna Haraway (2007): a thought of the post and not of the
meta which, for its part, maintains the games of dualities and differentiations, which supposes an inside
and an outside, precisely a border without which the event of the crossing would have neither meaning
nor effect. It will be necessary to come back to this point, further, when the concluding persistence of
the question of the double will be evoked in the last volume of the Technopères cycle.
If the monster theme remains, it is precisely because the Meta-Baron's plan to transform and increase is
fully visible in the corporeality he displays. In a world where monstrous and mutant forms abound,
compared to a still visible human body image, the monstrous as a category does not arise from the
oppositions of deviance and the norm. Rather, it forces us to think about the specificity of a conscious
journey, of a project of ideal corporeality that has its source in the exposure of the difference between
bio and mecha. Metasurgery operations, ablations and grafts actualize an augmentation bodily outcome.
On this point, Jodorowsky is most explicit. Thus we can read in the glossary of The House of the
Ancestors, in the article "Cyborg", these words of the author:
When I created the Meta-Baron, I didn't want some sort of Superman who received his powers and
descended directly from a Greek god. The Meta-Baron created his powers himself. His transfer is
voluntary. He is a human trying to access the superhuman, through pain and the implantation of
machines in his body. Some kind of super-cyborg. In our time, man is mutating because his conscience
tells him that he is destroying the world. Basically, we are a mutilated race, spiritually speaking, we
inhabit a mutilated planet… To achieve our fulfillment, we have to graft ourselves on foreign elements,
computers. That's why I invented the Meta-Barons, like a concentrate of the human race, with all its
implants, mini-bombs all over the body […].

But we know that a becoming, if it is change, is not a term of arrival, a stasis in the targeted state, but a
process, a movement in action or the reverse, an action in action. movement: graphic hyper-violence (to
the point of upsetting the designer himself, confides Gimenez in the article “Mutilations” [2016: 62]),
visual gore and horror, ob-scene (in the sense of Octave Mannoni, 1969) which brings out in the show
what constitutes the opposite scene, presents itself to everyone's eyes and which should however
remain hidden so as not to offend modesty or common sense. Here, all the states of violence, the desire
for castration, the fantasy of fusion and disappearance, the suffering inflicted on the pretext of love, of
the ethos of the lineage, of the ideology of the aristocratic force which then provides the model of a
great destiny that Jodorowsky, in his interviews, envisages on that of ancient Greek tragedy (see the
article "Tragedy" [2016: 86]). A weaving of fantasies and political questions, of subjection to the family
and of violence which only leads to emancipation at the cost of loss: by ablation, as we have said, but
also by the destruction of ties to achieve a space of singularity, but also of absolute solitude (s) at the
end of which the increase is acquired. However, the increase leaves the subject without vis-à-vis,
without any further possibility of otherness, renouncing the lineage by the absence of a patronymic.
Thus is seen prolonged in the solitary ideal of the increase, the becoming monster: Nameless is the
culmination of the caste, the terminus of the lineage of the Castaka; at its origin was Otho, the castrated
Meta-Baron. Castaka: caste, castration.

"Caste" in French first conveys the meaning of group and social privilege, echoing castes in Hindu
culture. But its Portuguese etymology clearly refers the term to the notion of "race": the Castaka, a race
which is perpetuated by self-generation, without penises and without sperm, but through the seminal
drop of blood (Volume 2), a race which proceeds by cloning the mother into the figure of the son's wife
in volume 4, Oda la bisaïeule (1997). Honorata re-enacts Jocasta, the Oedipal scene is at its height in
the distortion of what Jodorowsky sees as a renewal of the tragic Oedipal question [6]. The soul is that
of the mother, the body, that of Oda her daughter-in-law, and Aghnar, the son horrified by this variation
in incest, begot a male heir, son and brother at the same time, that of fury he beheaded: "Graft it into a
machine." His body can live. He is my flesh and Oda's. His spirit, son of your degeneration, was to be
destroyed ”(2011: 227).

Further on, in volume 5 (Tête-d'Acier, the grandfather, 1998), while Tête-d'Acier seeks, in order to
seduce Doña Vicenta Gabriela de Rokha, the mythical last poet, Zaran Krleza, the latter no has more
body and has preserved his brain in a robotic and computer device. The perfect being, for each of the
two parts, the being augmented by the contribution of the other, can then come together: "You are a
body without a head and I am a head without a body. Be together. We will become one of two. I will
bring my sublime feelings and you your Titan strength. Thus the poet will be a warrior and the warrior
will be a poet [7] ”(2011: 294).

Or, the ultimate figure of increase, when generation is literally self-generating. Aghora has the body of
a woman and the brain of a man. Already the androgynous utopia is at the origin of his birth: Steelhead
and Doña Vicenta conceived twins, a boy and a girl. They are linked by the hips, but have only one
common brain. The boy will not survive the separation of the fetuses, Steelhead transfers his brain to
his daughter's body. Despite his promise to his wife, and against the virile logic of his lineage, he fuses
the brain of the male twin and the body of the twin and gives birth to Aghora. It is Aghora, the father-
mother, who will give birth to the last Meta-Baron of the line, by drawing from his own brain the male
tissues from which to self-fertilize and thus give birth to Nameless. Interposing himself in a fight
between the androgynous Monkey and his father-mother, the baby born to Aghora shows all his might
before the imperial court. Aghora puts it this way: “This child is an absolute weapon and as such has no
name. The profession erases the person ”(2011: 442). If the born son of Aghora does not have a name,
it is perhaps not only because of the radical warlike power of which he is the depositary, but because
his origin, the form of his begetting, constitutes the term. of the fiction of augmentation implemented in
the cycle of the Meta-Barons. Beyond that, there is no longer any name or suffix to say the increase
which it is the accomplishment of.

The technological processes, the sci-fi equipment that led to this birth, this self-production of the
subject, inventing the forms of reproduction and generation, call for another genre, other assignments
where what is heard from these recent years is taking shape in other places, other discourses: neutral,
undifferentiated, transhumanity, posthumanity, cyborg, we used to say in Haraway or Hoquet.
Jodorowsky's cycles invent the science-fictional frescoes of these discourse in constitution, both as the
horizon of possibilities to come, but also as the threat and the anxiety which spring from the tensions
between flesh and technique, the bio and the mechanic.
However, this is where we must not forget either the narrative constructions or the humor that
particularly shape the story of La Caste de Méta-Barons. Tonto ("the fool" in Spanish) is the cycle
narrator robot who, under pressure from his robot narrator, Lothar, shapes the great cycle. The
metanarrative intrusions are constant and openly participate in the comic device: jokes, confrontation,
promises and frustrations, myriad of comical insults offer a game of distance while ensuring a control
function that structures the chronology and summarizes the progress of the plot. . Lothar and Tonto let
on several occasions in the cycle hear from their mecha corporality, a desire for organic bodies, and in
particular for the mystery attached to sexual enjoyment [8]. The increase for them is part of a long
tradition of the manufactured man who lacks sensation and emotion; they make heard the claim of the
mechanical being wanting to be also endowed with affects. It is in this perspective that Tonto, faced
with the alcoholism of Sans-Nom, fearing his master's cirrhosis, imagines himself entertaining him by
making "a human female body of a kind that my intra-encyclopedia described as". torrid ”” (2011:
493). The mecha-pin-up only triggers hilarity, sobs and then anger from the Meta-Baron, who kicks her
to pieces, screaming, "Fool. Your medicine of love loathes me. If you don't want me to feel more alone
again, become the robot you are again. "(2011: 294-295)

Transubstantiation
If the cycle of the Meta-Barons shows the mechanical increases of the organic bodies and the meta-
surgical negotiations of the augmented procreations, if it reveals the sexual grotesque of the reversal of
this desire in the dreamed sexuality of the mechanics, the process of increase goes through another
paradigm in Les Technopères. In this second cycle, it is a question of the possibility of transcending
this distinction of orders or regimes - bio / mecha in the cycle of the Meta-Barons - by moving the
opposition of bodies to the field of ontology: real against virtual , physical versus digital, incarnation
versus dematerialization. The Technoper cycle situates the logic of ideal augmentation in the context of
a humanity mutilated by the capitalistic monopoly of games. The augmentation is then treated by
means of an ontological shift which is expressed, under Jodorowsky's spiritualist focus, as a
transubstantiation. Here, the fiction of augmentation does not involve quantitative or qualitative bodily
modification: it is less meta than trans, it traverses essences, natures or substances. The augmentation is
based, in Technopères, on a principle of disembodiment prior to transubstantial realization.

The journey that Albino takes is openly related to stories of training and initiation: intergalactic
bildungsroman, The Technopères proceeds from a picaresque narrative retrospection [9] in which
Albino, dictating his memories in front of his companion Tinigri, a sort of little mutant mouse, recounts
the hero's entire pilgrimage. It will have consisted in extracting oneself from materiality, but not to
access a spiritual transcendence which would involve, quite classically, abandoning the carnal envelope
for the benefit of spiritual life. To do this, we need, there too, a change of nature. Unlike the
metacorporeality of bio and mech that accomplishes humanity in the fusion of orders, it is about
making a change of substance or ontology. In the generalized digital game world, in the texture of a
world where we live and die in the virtual world, the body itself must become virtual, absolutely
dematerialize and marry the total malleability of the code that allows it to actualize himself before the
eyes of others in any possible form. Metamorphism may then seem like the end of the increase beyond
which there is no longer any noticeable difference between distinct powers of bodies.

But this transubstantiation in no way tilts, in Jodorowsky, in a kind of too irenic and soaring New Age
spiritualism. In a world of digital illusions in which the game constitutes the source of the hegemonic
power of its makers, the real is not even a lack, it has ceased to be desirable as a character from
Megalex openly says: "You would like to not close it a bit ?! Holovideo is a hell of a lot more real than
all of your reality rot! Let us see, hear, feel in peace! "(2009: 18)
At the end of the gesture, the 500,000 young technopers and their paleo-Moses find a planet, a natural
haven that offers the hope of a refoundation; the last volume is called The Lost Galaxy. A box on the
front page hints at ecological hopes, as well as a discordant voice: this world is so real that Albino, the
dematerialized being, cannot get out of the ship and live there. In his own words, "there is no room for
the abstract being that I have become" (2014: 363). The natural world opposes them first with a
gigantic monster that acts as a guardian, then walls which are constantly being rebuilt. Finally, the
ultimate trick of the planet, it confronts each of the characters with his double. This does not refer them
only to themselves, in a reflexive scene heir to a long fantastic tradition abundantly upgraded in the
imaginaries of science fiction and the digital arguments of contemporary technologist metafictions
(Mellier, 2018). The double, here, reinstates in the utopian project, the part of negativity and internal
cleavage against which spirituality or ethics are in constant struggle: the planet proposes to constantly
test the utopian promise and its ideal of a good life. so that the pan-techs can "conquer [themselves]" by
"eliminating the dark side of [their] personality" (2014: 386). Now, it is on this precise point that we
must note two important elements of the conclusion of the Technoper cycle that occur after this passage
through the double and its reflective scene.

The first is attached to the character of Gofh, the poet whose tongue has been mutilated and who, after
sacrificing himself for his companions, is brought back to life by the power of Albino: only Gofh
returns from "this transformation that [ bios] call death ”in the words of Albino (2014: 356-357),
heartless, which allows him to conceive of feelings, but not to feel them. Thus, at the end of the
confrontation with his double, Gofh will retain, in the midst of utopian optimism and voluntarism, the
charge of negativity which comes to relativize and question the desire for purity openly expressed by
the natural forces of the planet and spiritualism. from Albino.

Being virtual unable to leave his ship to live in the real world of the planet, Albino is therefore doomed
to boredom and lonely death. Tinigri proposes to him to merge their substances, materiality and
virtuality, to result in an incarnation which, pleasantly, mixes with the sublime grandeur of a bodily
identity established between the kingdoms, the grotesque of the fusion of their bodies. Tinigri and
Albino are metamorphosed into a glorious and comical full-page Tinalban. The ultimate transformation
is less a regression to materiality than a fusion of two becomings, one of which is animal. She then
realizes another allegory of the actualization of the increase in the ecological imagination of spiritual
realms and values, these however remaining powerless without some form of incarnation. At the end of
the Technoper cycle, there is no overvaluation of transubstantiation. It was the pre-release stage and
then allows the return to the full legitimacy of a renewed incarnation. Likewise, in the final pages of the
final volume of the cycle, Gofh's double negative breaks out of the poet's human form as an overtly
monstrous figure, an expression of moral ugliness.

It takes the four arms of the mutant wife to accept to welcome the version, precisely complete in its
contradiction, of a subject carrying the values of good and evil, which then assert themselves as the
joint expressions of becoming and of negativity. Without the humor of the Mechs or Tinigri, without
the grotesque of forms and bodies, without the ethical struggle of contradictory values and impulses,
only the spiritual and technophobic utopia would remain, as well as the rather agreed celebration of
disembodiment and of the Edenic myth. It takes a spectacular mutant - red skinned and with four arms -
to remind us that there is no transformation or growth without ethical negotiation with oneself and
figures of otherness.

Neology
The second important element concerns the neological augmentation of language itself. One of the
areas where the fiction of augmentation and its paradoxes is undoubtedly expressed the best, in the
cycles of the Meta-Barons and the Technopères, is perhaps that of language and more particularly of
lexical creation: Techno- executioners, paleocretin, biomerde and other meta-surgery or techno-
bishops, and many other neologisms come to extend the power of language by grasping a common and
identifiable object that the affix shifts on the scale of time and value. There is the world of paleo, proto,
bio (that of human corporeality), the one before and then the one that came with machines, techno,
mecha and beyond, the meta.

The neology falls under augmentation because it reveals in the new form, the old root. The neologism
is the very signifier of the process of composition and conjunction of augmentation, as in the case of
the body where the bio and the mecha are paired, or again of the ontology of Technopères in the real-
virtual trajectory. real. Unlike creation by lexical derivation, neology reveals the two members of the
new signifier: the affix and the etymon, paleo-moron! There is no need to go back to the etymology or
to the (possibly intertextual) reference as in the case of Castaka or Melmoth (the name chosen by
Steelhead and the last poet after their fusion). The neology lets appear, clearly visible, the body
composed of the word, the adjoining and affixed parts which draw, in the same gesture, a neo-
homogeneity of the signifier while showing the heterogeneity of the signifieds, fully audible, within it.

"Holy shit of holy shit" repeats abundantly Tinigri: thanks to the comic countermeasure of the insult,
the neology does not arise from a xenolanguage or the effects of authority of the xeno-encyclopedias
characteristic of science fiction. These lexicons are certainly not absent from Jodorowsky's worlds, but
their use is very much in keeping with the invented universes of anticipation and space opera. In this
sense, this usage does not differ from that of a science-fictional world like that of Dune by Frank
Herbert (1965). The neo-logy here is indeed a semantic process that refers to a rhetoric of hyperbole,
that is to say of the qualitative or quantitative increase of the utterance. Stylistically, hyperbole is not an
economic figure, it stands out clearly and it is customary to prefer the subtle suggestion of
understatement to it. By neology, in Jodorowsky's work, the body of the word is then in the image of
the meta-baronic body or of the techno ontological contradiction. The body of the word openly lets
appear in the language and in the writing of text bubbles, the work of composition and augmentation:
its problematic authority, its ideological signified (techno-executioner, meta-surgery and other pan-
techno), but also all the carnival power of laughter.

Jodorowsky says he used the prefix meta in the idea of beyond, of going beyond, in the common sense
of "metaphysics". We know, however, all the contemporary plasticity of the prefix: its seme of
transcendent dimension of the data it prefixes has also been reversed, in the way in which meta serves
to open up complex, duplicated, reflexive and specular spaces within its subject. "Metalliterary" means,
for example, just as much beyond the literary as in relation to the literary, as well as within the literary
itself.

In Jodorowsky's cycles the fiction of augmentation is indeed meta, and this perhaps never appears as
much as in the process of writing neology; this allows beyond, just as much as from and about ancient
matter (in this case present), to show and manifest the process of creation that acts. Whether this
process is openly themed by fiction as in the game of bio, mecha, techno, reality and virtual, and by the
power of its graphic expressions, or whether it is the one who, turning to the artistic work designer and
screenwriter, reveals, through the issue of the making of bodies and worlds, that of the medium
himself.

Notes
[1] JODOROWSKY, Alejandro. 2014. "The Penitentiary School of Nohope", Les Technopères.
Complete edition. Paris: Humanoïdes Associés, volume 2, p. 115.
[2] It is necessary to add to the cycle as ninth volume a special album: La Maison des Ancêtres (2000).
[3] For all the elements attached to the coherence of the articulations between the albums of the cycle,
the questions relating to the genealogy of the characters, the psychoanalytic thematings exposed in the
tragic conflict - to hear literally written in the intertext of the Greek tragedies -, but also the
autobiographemes assumed by the author, we will refer to the precise data exposed in the glossary of
the Meta-Barons cycle established by Christophe Quillien, in the expanded edition of La Maison des
Ancêtres (2016).
[4] We can recognize here the cross influence of Cornelius Castoriadis, and René Daumal whose Le
Mont Analogue (1952) was freely adapted for cinema by Jodorowsky in La Montagne Sacrée (1973).
[5] "I strove to guide, like a paleoMoise, my 500,000 young pan-techies to the promised galaxy, to
found there a new society where happy human relationships would be more valuable than technological
development. ", Opening of volume 4 of Technopères, Halkattraz, Etoile des executionreaux (2014
[2002]: 167).
[6] See the articles “Oedipus” (2016: 63), “Psyche et Eros” (2016: 74) and “Tragédie” (2016: 86).
[7] The man born of this union of strength and poetry, Zaran and Steelhead agreed to name him
Melmoth. This is the name of the eponymous hero of Charles Maturin's 1820 Gothic novel, Melmoth
the Wanderer; the wandering man, who is doomed to wander the world awaiting the liberating death
until no one takes back the evil pact that binds him. The power is here, in a gothic and romantic
reference, attached to the lost soul, to wandering, and to the infinity of pain.
[8] Lothar: "Ouch, Ouch, Ouch, love, how I would like to have between two thighs a soft tube that
grows, hardens, stands up, then spits! ... Or a smooth canal, lined with hair, which gets wet! The
organism of the Bios is a sublime madness! I drool over it. Our mathematical perfection is so
monotonous ... "- Tonto:" I allow you this interruption only because you are absolutely right, Lothar.
I'm bored too ... "(2011: 185).
[9] Jodorowsky employs the notion of picaresque to account for the first volume of the Meta-Baron
cycle and the social rise of the pirate Dayal to the origin of La Caste des Méta-Barons.