December 9, 1973. In an article published in the Corriere della Sera Pasolini laments the acculturation brought about by capitalism. In particular, he deplores the loss of the “peripheral cultures which, until a few years ago had their own life assured – essentially a free life, even if within the poorest, or even miserable, peripheral…
Category: Otherness
10 – 3 ≠ 7; 10 – 3 = 13
Should we have learned indigenous mathematics or, more exactly, should we remember them – for we were all once indigenous peoples – the world would be different and probably better than it is today. For the ontology behind modern mathematics and, more broadly, modern science, is anything but neutral. Put differently, reality is not just…
More on Chaos, Rhythm, and Forms
We have written elsewhere on schizophrenia, following Jean Oury, as a “rhythmic distortion.” We would now like to add that such distortion is neither what one presences when one witnesses a schizophrenic delirium nor what one enters when one enters one. For, as Freud stresses, it is at re-building their collapsed worlds that psychotics aim…
When Binary Thought is Not What you Think
A Primal Evolutionary Phenomenon and a Recurrent Social-Cultural Constituent “It is a singular property of the human species,” writes Leroi-Gourhan, “that by confining itself to engendering action, it periodically eludes the organic specialization that would definitively tie it down. If the hand of the earliest anthropoid had become a tool by adaptation, the result would…
Becoming Extra-Moderns
I As Tim Ingold writes, “apprehending the world is not a matter of construction but of engagement, not of building but of dwelling, not of making a view of the world but of taking up a view in it.”(*) This does not only mean that all knowledge is, by definition, situated; it also means that…
A Post-Anthropocentric Take on the Human Difference
C. Boesch writes that “wild chimpanzees seem to use drumming on buttressed trees to convey information and changes of travel direction.”(*) From this we may infer that at least some animals have symbolic language, i.e. an abstract and agreed-upon type of language. Conversely, iconicity (in terms of the mimicry of visual, sound, and olfactive forms,…
Derrida’s Mistake – or, Why One Should Never Philosophise on the Origins of Things According to What Happens at One’s Home
I In Of Grammatology, Derrida rejects Lévi-Strauss’s account of his encounter with the Nambikwara as naif. Lévi-Strauss, says Derrida, is a victim of the typical Rousseauian nostalgia before an allegedly-egalitarian-and-transparent society in which any attempt on the part of one of its members to concentrate power and turn opaque its transparency is punished by the…
If God Loves You, It Means He Is Your Enemy: On Savage Thought and Christian Non-Sense
I. On Different Types of Oneness – and Their Danger Christian universalism is epitomised in these two passages extracted from two of Paul’s letters: “There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus” (Gal…
Cruelty and Tenderness among Extra-Modern Peoples
Extra-modern peoples are often viewed not only as materially underdeveloped, politically immature, and culturally uneducated, but also as being fundamentally cruel. We cannot discuss here all these accusations, which tell more about those who pronounce them than about anything else. But there is one we would like to examine here: the supposed cruelty of indigenous…
Dionysos and Apollo
I Dionysos and Apollo Dionysos and Apollo shared one sanctuary: Delphi, located on a ridge of the Parnassos mountains overlooking the Valley of Phokis and the surrounding hills, near the town of Krissa north of the Gulf of Corinth in today’s region of Sterea or Central Greece. Dionysos was worshiped there in the winter, whereas…