Poetics of Others: Cannibal Resistance to Total War

Abstract

This essay is another exercise in understanding our present based on the anthropophagic proposals of Oswald de Andrade, Suely Rolnik, and Viveiros de Castro, among others. We will see if, along the way, we allow ourselves or are forced to experiment with some ways of being that, between forms and forces (Rolnik), do not have to be governed by the devices of alienation and exploitation to which global capitalism wants to accustom us. Here, we aim to rethink, above all, the continuity between the ethical and the political issues. From anthropophagic enunciation, this continuity opens us up to a peculiarly cosmic idea about the community and about ourselves that breaks the socio-atomic project that threatens to totalize the world. The predation demands that we pursue and develop in our relationship with the land and with others to meet the standards of information societies in the context of advanced capitalism, forces us (right?) to stop and reflect. At this point, the cannibal line has the advantage of providing us with a special style to carry out this much needed reflection. It is the poetic mode, from which thought becomes aware, not only of its creative and performative powers, but of its dislocation and breaking power of a few gripping, perhaps too human, logic.