Comunicação Internacional
What is the critical and clinical creative power of the Amerindian cosmogonies?
Organização:  University of Belgrade & University of Plymouth
University of Belgrade
10 / 07 / 2023
Resumo:

In The Flesh of Words. Politics of Writing, in his commentary on Deleuze’s Bartleby, Rancière shows that no politics can result from the celibate characters’ becomings. According to Rancière, the big picture of a new political experience that can be found in Deleuze’s text on Bartleby is the wall of free stones because “the utopia and the hope that Deleuze had towards Bartleby as the Confidence Man of the American world finally appears to be weakened by this image of the wall. It is an image that confronts Deleuze with the possibility of a Flaubert’s quietism or with an indifferentism. The question thus becomes: how can Bartleby, the indifferent, constitute a fraternal community?”. Rancière thus denounces what he considers to be the displacement of the political towards a metaphysics of the multitude and a dramaturgy of the feast. “Under the mask of Bartleby, Deleuze opens to us the great road of the comrades; the great inebriation of multiplicities that are happy and emancipated from the Father’s law; the route of a certain ‘deleuzisme’ which is perhaps the ‘fête de l’âne’ of Deleuze’s thought. But this road leads us to a contradiction: the free stone wall is the wall of the non-path. We don’t go from the multitudinous incantation of the Being, towards any political justice. Literature opens no passage towards a Deleuzian politics. There is no Dionysian politics”.
Now, in their book The ends of the world, Danovski and Viveiros de Castro state that among all cosmogonies, the Ameridian cosmogonies are the only that pose both a people and a world.  That their production of a people to come, of a becoming-other, of the creation of a world belong to the daily experience of the Amerindians: the “collective political otherness”. In such a way, that “the expression common in the mouths of beginning left-wing militants, ‘everything is political’, acquires a literal radicalism in the case of the Amerindians (including in the indeterminacy of that ‘everything’)”.
Following Rancière’s critique to Deleuze, my proposal is to think out how the Amerindian cosmogonies correspond to a politics and how they sign a possible line of flight for the political, ecological, sociological crisis we are living. Have these cosmogonies a fabulative power? In their concepts of “people to come”, of “becoming”, are we dealing with a Dionysian politics – or even a politics whatsoever? And more radically: is the relation between literature and life – that Deleuze defines as being essential to a critical and a clinical of civilization – an event belonging to the sphere of politics?


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