In what follows, we render all indigenous terms in curly brackets to remind the reader that indigenous languages were, originally, non-written languages. This does not mean they were simpler, though. The fact that many indigenous languages are polysynthetic, for instance, makes them complex to an extreme which is hard for us to even fancy; thus…
Category: Otherness
On Conceptual Noise and De-territorialisation
Due to human inactivity during the lockdown, in late March mountain goats were seen roaming the streets of a Welsh town. Events like this have provoked four different types of reaction in the social media. Some (A) celebrate such events (too naively?) as a return of nature to places from where it had been exiled….
Chaos, Rhythm, and Forms
Schizophrenics are like unstable points inside machinic circuits, thus their frequent drawings and narratives on the “influencing machines” they are, in their perception, connected to and controlled by. Generally, these “machines” reflect the technological status of the historical period in question: they can be immaterial (e.g. religious or theological) machines, mechanical machines with gears and…
What Socialism Owes to the Tupinamba
In 1550 the Tupinamba travelled to France to take part as French allies in the Royal Entry Festival of Henri II in Rouen. A few years later, in 1562, they visited Rouen again, invited by Charles IX. Montaigne wrote extensively on them in Chapter 31 of his First Book of Essays, published in 1580. This…
On Extramodern Stateless Societies
Let’s begin with a few axioms and theses: Axiom 1. Freedom and servitude are opposite notions. Axiom 2. Instead, servitude and domination are complementary notions. Axiom 3. Domination and servitude establish social inequality. Thesis 1. All forms of state entail some sort of domination and servitude, hence inequality. Therefore, they restric freedom. Thesis 2. Freedom…
Those Who(se Bodies) Do Not Look Like Us
Early in the morning at the Pnyx, west of the Acropolis, Aristotle and Spinoza walk and chat on the eve of the Greater Eleusinian Mysteries… Aristotle: “But don’t we say that the body is defined in two ways: as a compound of form and matter, on the one hand, and, in physical terms, by its…
Little Stories from Malawi // S&C
We had a chance to visit Malawi in July 2019. We travelled there to learn about the environmental-justice initiatives put forward in various villages by the Lilongwe-based NGO Youth for Sustainable Development (YSD) over the past eight years—practices that have effectively enabled such villages to recover their pre-colonial agricultural practices and thereby strengthened their economic…
Plato, Author of a Tukano Myth // Carlos
Is writing so very useful? A Tukano myth tells that Yepa [Huake, the demiurge] said to Yupuri Bauro, the chief of the Tukano: “In this world, you will have several riches: ritual ceremonies, feathers, arrows, blowguns, benches… Your riches will remain in your homes, the homes of the Tukano – it is there that your…
Persian Love // C&S
Ancient Persian temples had no icons and no statues inside or outside their walls. They hosted fire altars. Altars with fire. Altars of fire. Fire symbolises the sacred (xodā). We are all fire. We are all incandescent. We are all a degree of intensity within a cosmic blazing dance. A burning flame. Unlike in the…
A Pure Body – Artaud’s Dream // Carlos
Trees do not exist: nobody has ever seen one. We see something we identify and name as “a tree,” but what we call a tree is always something else than what we assume. Suppose we touch the tree instead of staring at it: free from its twofold visual enclosure – from its numeric and objectual…