CANNIBAL METAPHYSICS 1 Jean-Christophe Goddard 2 Starting with a hallucination by Spinoza the Marrano, Jean-Christophe Goddard invites us to reconsider the mixing characteristic of Brazil, a country where the natives devoured the colonists. He suggests that we begin with a literal understanding of cannibalism.
In 1664, barely a century after what, in the famous founding document of Brazilian modernism, the "Cannibal Manifesto" (1928), Oswald de Andrade called the "swallowing of the Bishop Sardinha" (when the first Portuguese Bishop of Brazil was cut up and devoured by Caete Indians, in 1556), the Portuguese Marrano philosopher Bento de Espinosa, whose family chose Holland in preference to Brazil when going into exile, wrote to the "very wise and prudent" Pierre Balling 3 to tell him about the singular visual hallucination that he had suffered: the insistent mage seen on waking — all the more vividly because of his waning attention — of a "black, dirty Brazilian" that, de Espinosa felt impelled to add, he "had never seen before." In an earlier letter . letter . Balling asked the philosopher to explain a hallucination of his own, when he heard the agonized groans of his son, who at the time was in good health. Now, one might suppose that if this Bento Bento de Espino Espinosa, sa, who insisted insisted on being being called called Benedictu Benedictus s de Spinoza Spinoza,, the name under under which which he enter entered ed the Pantheon Pantheon of Philosophers in Europe, showed such concern at this halluc inatory presage, and took such care in answering Balling, his main purpose was to clearly distinguish h is case from that of his c orrespondent: on one side, the psychic power, conferred by love, of vivid ly imagining events that might occur in the life of a loved one; on the other, simple retinal persistence at the moment of waking, of a dream image, the simple effect on the imagination of an alteration of the body, as fever is the cause of delirium. SPINOZA THE MESTIZO
The denial is flagrant. flagrant. Because this image of the Brazi Braz ilian becomes an "Ethiopian" only a few lines further, it has appropriately been interpreted as a denial of Jewishness. The insulting character of the adjectives "black" and "dirty," which are reprised in the word "Ethiopian", which in Greek means "people with burned faces", has been emphasized, and one could easily complete the analysis by saying that the image of this total alterity of a man "never seen before," is the most insulting image of all: that of a "dirty Jew." It has also been stressed that in the seventeenth century Brazil and Ethiopia were two spaces of Portuguese colonization, but not enough emphasis has been placed on a specific dimension shared by the two insults ("Braz ilian" and "Ethiop ian") when applied to Marranos: hybridization. The image of the "dirty" Brazilian/Ethiopian was, primarily for Bento de Espinosa (in keeping with the meaning of the word falasha which, in Amharic, designates Ethiopian Jews) the pejorative image of an exile, of an immigrant who, unlike what was possible for Benedictus Spinoza in Golden Age Holland, was unable to free himself of his hybrid Marrano character, neither neither Jew nor Christian. This hybridization was in fact redoubled because of colonization, since the Brazilian Marrano, as neither Portuguese nor Jewish, was neither colonizer nor colonized. In other words, he was specifically "Brazilian" in the very sense that this paradoxical identity is understood in relation to its anthropophagous anthropophagous origin and the mixing that it implies between the colonized and the colonizer; for, for, as the Brazilian anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, the devouring of the colonists by the Tupinamba Tupinamba — an event that was widely known in Europe in Spinoza's day thanks to the account given by Hans Staden, which was translated into Latin, Dutch and Portuguese (True Story and Description of a Country of Wild, Naked, Grim, Man-eating People in the New World, America, 1557) — had as its end point as much the becoming-Tupinamba of the whites as the becoming-white of the Tupinamba. This is attested by numerous letters from Jesuits denouncing colonists for "going native" (as Viveiros de Castro puts it), marrying Indians, killi ng enemies in the terreiros, and themselves becoming anthropophagi. anthropophagi. The appearance of this Renaissance image (which in fact is undatable, if we think that Spinoza locates this moment of halluci hallucination in a city where he was not living at the purported date of the event) is closely linked to the history of Portuguese colonialism. As Gilles Deleuze has emphasized, any binary machine — and the machine of colonial power is certainly that — is not crudely dualistic, but dichotomous, producing mixedness itself as a new binary element: if you are neither Jewish nor Christian, neither Jewish nor Ethiopian, neither Jewish nor Portuguese, neither colonizer nor colonized, then you still have the choice between the philosopher Benedictus de Spinoza (or Baruch Spinoza) and the half-breed Bento de Espinosa. It is this dichotomous machine — which reaches far beyond the personality of the philosopher himself — wh ich gave rise to the hallucinatory image of the Brazilian: a selfimage, an image of the Brazilian Self, crossbred, hybrid — the self of all those caught up in such a machine. "Tupi or not Tupi, that is the question," wrote Oswald de Andrade in the Cannibal Manifesto, for this dichotomy is that of cannibal versus non-canniba non-cannibal. l. The symptomat symptomatic ic image of Spinozism, Spinozism, we may say (applying (applying to Spinoza the concept concept mobilized mobilized by Georges Georges DidiHuberman to analyze the construction, within madness, of the Warburgian theory of culture), is that of hybridization, of mixing, of the indigenous devouring of the culture and religion of the West, of their polarities (it is indeed the same as that of Aby Warburg, so effectively effectively does his snake/light snake/lightning ning shaft liberate liberate the affirmatio affirmation n of a "satanisch "satanische e Fresslust" Fresslust" [a Satanic Satanic pleasure pleasure in devouring devouring or gobbling] ). It is in the folly of this Brazil ian-indigenous image that Spinoza constructs his philosophy. philosophy. CANNIBAL ANTHROPOLOGY AND PHILOSOPHY
Too much attention has been paid to the explanation of the hallucinatory vision of the son's death as indicating the imagination's power to express the father's partaking of the essence of the son by virtue of love. Here we can very precisely gauge the remarkable contribution of Viveiros de Castro's American-Indian anthropology and its sketch of what a "cannibal metaphysics" might be. According to de Castro, the unconscious communicati communicat ion between father and son at the base of the veracious hallucination has three characteristic features of Western metaphysics: it is intra-specific (it takes place between human beings); it is found on filiative production; and it repeats the prototypical expression of the Other in the figure of the Friend or Loved One which makes philia the medium of knowledge. The screen explanation presented to Balling is indeed that of Benedictus versus Bento. The repugnant image of the hybrid that appeared to Bento (as the contemporary Brazilian philosopher, Bento Prado Junior, likes to point out), the image of the dirty Brazilian signifying his own going native, carries within itself other metaphysical possibilities that the West would never have encountered if it had not had the colonial experience of its own deglutition. For de Castro, the attempt to make philosophical use of indigenous thought implies putting the Enemy's viewpoint, as opposed to the Friend's, at the centre of our vision of ourselves (being ourselves by incorporating the enemy); that we substitute relations relations of filiation filiation and hereditary hereditary reproductio reproduction n with movements movements of capture, capture, of predation, predation, relations of symbiosis symbiosis and transversal transversal connections connections between between heterogene heterogeneous ous elements; elements; that substitute substitute intra-specif intra-specific ic communicati communication on with inter-specif inter-specific ic becoming becoming (as the intensive, affective relation of the human to the non-human). Now, it is interesting that de Castro should find these characteristics of a
cannibal philosophy at work in A Thousand Plateaus : "Becoming-intense, becoming-animal, becoming-imperceptible." 4 It is even more striking that Deleuze and Guattari should then apply them while recollecting Spinoza ("Memories of a Spinozist, I and II"): first of all, there is "a unity to the plane of nature which applies equally to the inanimate and the animate, the artificial and the natural," and "the infinity of the modifications [...] are part of one another," and belong to a given individual in accordance with the relation of movement and rest in which they are engaged; secondly, circulations of affects which are becomings ("unnatural" participations: a man becoming a rat, a rat becoming a man) in accordance with relations of composition and decomposition that take place on the same plane of nature. How is this singular coincidence between de Castro's cannibal anthropology and Deleuze and Guattari's metaphysics of nature to be understood, if not v ia Spinoza - in other words, already, Brazil? Through the philosophical translation of indigenous thought taking the form of a metaphysics of becomings, of hybridizations, of participations and orderings, all aberrant, within a nature conceived as the multiplicity of multiplicities. This indigenous dimension of Spinozism — of their Spinozism — is surely what Deleuze and Guattari were expressing when they presented their own way of proceeding as that of witches, and by writing, several times, "We, the witches." 5 The hallucinatory image of the "dirty Brazilian" was the image of the cannibal thought that Bento de Espinosa was going to introduce into Europe, in a subterranean kind of way, until the Spinozism long hidden by the readings imposed by the problematics of white metaphysics finally showed its true face, as a creature of mixed blood.
LITERAL CANNIBALISM AND GLOBAL CANNIBALISM
Does this mean that the transition from the insulting insulting and violent image of the dirty hybrid to the conceptual conceptual edification of indigenous indigenous thought thought was the same as the transition transition made by modern modern Brazil from literal anthropopha anthropophagy gy (eat ing men) to anthropophagic ontology (anthropophagy as a way of being): the capture of all alterities, mixing, the deglutition of differences, pillage, multiplicity as instruments of a pacific self-creation. self-creation .? For de Castro, the disappearance of literal cannibalism strengthened its general, ontological dimension. The victory of Indian anthropophagy, the application of its bellicose vengeance, to the Western colonizer, thus culminated, perhaps, in the emergence of what Suely Rolnik calls a "flexible subjectivity," which is essentially traversed by the Other, engaged in the twentieth century century in systematic systematic experimentation experimentation with processes processes of hybridizatio hybridization n and fusion, the deterritori deterritorializati alization on and creation of new configuration configurations, s, from de Andrade's Andrade's modernist movement (1920s), (1920s), to concrete concrete poetry (1950s), (1950s), Neo-Concret Neo-Concretism ism in the visual arts (late 1950s, early 60s), tropicalismo in music (1960s) and all the way to certain aspects of the policies of former president Lula, which Giuseppe Cocco analyzed as a "cannibal politics" in his recently published Mundo Braz. Now, Rolnik has also shown the possible ambiguity of this victory, assuming this consists of just such a triumph of the ontological over the literal. She has shown how, starting in the 1980s, 1980s, thanks to the emerging emerging new technologies technologies for producing producing and reproducing reproducing images, capitalism, having become "cultural/informational", took advantage of the anthropophagic flexibility of the modern subject, of its essential mixedness, to produce and sell off-the-peg models of hybrid subjectification that could betaken up by anyone and endlessly renewed. Above aII, she showed how this globalization of anthropophagy had the unintended consequence of banishing the disquiet and inconstancy inconstancy that naturally naturally accompany accompany any process process of hybridization hybridization by guaranteeing, guaranteeing, through the new economy of the cognitive capitalism that multiplies world-images capable of temporarily structuring subjectivity, "a hedonistic kind of existence, smooth and unruffled, eternally stable." This, perhaps, is what is at stake in a defence of literal anthropophagy. anthropophagy. De Andrade's statements to the effect that cannibalism did not originate in hunger seems to plead against literal anthropology and in favour of a mainly ontological dimension. And yet it was again the Cannibal Manifesto that inspired notably the "hunger aesthetic" of Glauber Rocha, founder of Brazil's Cinema Novo in the 1960s. Deleuze, who saw Rocha's work as the supreme example of modern anti-colonial political cinema, noted the "strange positivity" of hunger in Rocha: the violence of the starving, the eater of earth, eater of roots, who steals and kills in order to eat, is anthropophagic violence, violence, the one that, in an aberrant communicatio communication n of all forms of violence violence (the violence of owners, bandits, prophets and saints), sends all social conditions into a trance, devouring differences in a movement that abolishes all prospect of progress and order. That is why, said Rocha was why there is "an anthropophagic relation between the characters in Antonio das Mortes [1969]: the teacher eats Antonio, Antonio eats the cangaceiro, Laura eats the commissioner, the professor eats Laura, the murderers eat the people, the professor eats the cangaceiro, This anthropophagic relation is one of freedom." I should add that in the popular Portuguese spoken by Rocha, eating also means fucking. The cannibal scene in Antonio das Mortes is a bodily confrontation of the interlaced enemies/lovers, rolling bloodily over each other on the dusty ground of the Sertão. This collusion of murderous violence and sexual predation, to the detriment of the social order, should not comes as a surprise we know what the ogre Gilles de Rais did to children. What Glauber Glauber Rocha set out to do was make cannibalism literal again, at the very heart of the global anthropophagy anthropophagy of cognitive capitalism. He did so by "imposing the violence of his images and his sounds in 22 international festivals." Here was a way of giving a voice to the image of the "black and dirty Brazilian" Translation, C. Penwarde without which Bento de Espinosa would not have bequeathed bequeathed us the heritage of Spinozism.
1 published in artpress 2 – March/April 2011 – Special issue CANNIBALS ALL coordinated by Jeanette Zwingenberger 2 Jean-Christo Jean-ChristopheGodd pheGoddard ard (born1959) (born1959) is professor of philosophy philosophy at the Université Université deToulouse deToulouse Mirail (France). He is the founder and coordinator coordinator of the international international university university consortium EuroPhilosophie, which brings together European and Brazilian universities in a shared academic project. In his book Violence et subjectlvité. Derrida, Deleuze, Maldiney (Librairie Vrin, 2008) he takes an anthropological and iconological approach to modern French thought, 3 Letter 17 from Spinoza to Pierre Balling (July 20,1664). 4 In the tenth chapter of Mille Plateaux by Gilles Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Paris: Editions deMinuit, 1980. 5 Idem.
