Amazona vittata: Notes on cosmopolitics and xenocide/ Amazona vittata: Notas sobre cosmopolitica e xenocidio.
| Autor | Valentim, Marco Antonio |
| Cargo | Report |
"what are they? [...] An alien life form that's capable of destroying all of humanity [...] an alien species that we cannot live with [...] in that case war is unavoidable [...] If an alien species seems bent on destroying us and we can't communicate with them, can't understand them [...] then we are justified in any action necessary to save ourselves [...] the complete destruction of the other species."
--Card (1)
Where is everybody?
--Fermi
"Continuous when divergent"
Coming from science fiction, the concept of xenocide--created to designate the extermination of altermundane humanities and even aloespecific ones by Man (Card 2013)--emphasizes the confrontation between different people like a conflict of cosmic order. Stengers conceives it, considering its form, in the following terms:
The "cosmos", as I hope to explain it, bears little relation to the world in which citizens of antiquity asserted themselves everywhere on their home ground, nor to an earth finally united, in which everyone is a citizen. [...] Nor does it refer to a project designed to encompass them all, for it is always a bad idea to designate something to encompass those that refuse to be encompassed by something else. In the term cosmopolitical, cosmos refers to the unknown constituted by these multiple, divergent worlds, and to the articulations of which they could eventually be capable, as opposed to the temptation of a peace intended to be final, ecumenical: a transcendent peace with the power to ask anything that diverges to recognize itself as a purely individual expression of what constitutes the point of convergence of all.." (2005)
The philosopher stands against the unification of peoples on Earth, in favor of another kind of articulation between them, because, she says, the multiplicity and divergence between their worlds is "irreducible." The "unknown" to which she refers is not a totality capable of understanding the many worlds in one, however ideal and utopian it may be. In contrast, it is a plan in which all those who resist being "encompassed by something else" are articulated, against any and all ultimate encompassment. Sustaining that convergence is not the only form of articulation between peoples as worlds, Stengers assumes the divergence positively, as an element of a refractory policy both to "final and ecumenical peace" and to the absolute and totalitarian dominion of the universal people, in relation to whom all others would be nothing more than "merely individual expressions".
This positive divergence differs from contradiction, since "it does not presuppose homogeneous terms, but refers to the encounter of heterogeneous ones, who become others while remaining the same, becoming self-different" (De la Cadena 2015: 280). Instead of imposing an insurmountable obstacle, divergence is what makes the encounter possible: "The place where the heterogeneous connect themselves is also the link of their divergence, their becoming with what they are not without becoming what they are not" (2015: 280). If the encounter implies autodifference, estrangement, for both sides, the other becomes indispensable, constitutive, and can never be removed without also annihilating the subject of reference itself, which coincides with itself only as "another of the Other" (Viveiros de Castro 2015: 36). There is only "continuity" with another, passing between worlds, in and by divergence: "A strange set of thoughts [is] continuous to ours when divergent from it and discontinuous when convergent" (Skafish 2018: 88). By contrast, the "point of convergence of all" takes self-identification as fundamental, postulating an original discontinuity between worlds that diverge. From this point of view, where the stranger needs to be neutralized, divergence takes a negative value or, at best, only an instrumental one.
In reclaiming the concept of cosmos to designate the plane of political articulation between multiple and divergent worlds--cosmopolitics--Stengers proposes an intentional misunderstanding of the Kantian concept of "cosmopolitanism", producing "a disagreement that may be capable of affecting the politics of modern politics itself" (De la Cadena 2015: 280). Undoubtedly, the terms "unified earth", "universal citizenship", "final peace", "transcendent power", "convergence point of all", all refer directly to the "court of reason" established by the Critique. But cosmopolitics is not the same as cosmopolitanism: strictly speaking, there is no common basic meaning between these concepts, although there is a complex and tense continuity between them. The act of conceptual equivocation performed by the philosopher constitutes a politically effective affirmation, a genuine actualization, of cosmic divergence.
Cosmopolis
Kant's Critique consists, as we know, in the spiritual discipline of Man. This discipline is both cosmological and political. It is the greatest science fiction of modern philosophy, a "cosmopolitan philosofiction" (Szendy 2011). Let us start with the second of these aspects. Regarding the status of the foreigner in the "legal social state", the project of Perpetual peace establishes:
It is usually accepted that a man may not take hostile steps against any one, unless the latter has alrey injures him by act. This is quite accurate, if both are citizens of a lae-governed state. For, in becoming a member of this community, each gives the other the secutiry exercising control over them both. The individual, however, (or nation) who remains in a mere state of nature deprives me of this secutiry and does me injury by mere proximity. There is perhaps no active (facto) molestation, but there is a state os lawlessness (status injustus) which, by its very existence, offers a continual menace to me. I can therefore compel him, either to enter into reations with me under which we are both subject to law, or to withdrw from my neighbourhood. (2) "Security" is the value that operates as a criterion to distinguish, to separate by judgment, the supposed natural state of war and the legal social state. In order to securely enjoy their "wild freedom" in the face of the ever-imminent threat posed by others by their mere existence, men must "become discouraged," progressing rationally in the direction of their necessary agreement under the same State. To this end, they experience, as a species, the favors of Nature, which only imposes obstacles on them to better discipline them (Kant 1986). But the same proposition, also and above all, presents the "state of peace"--Cosmopolis--as a regime of radical exclusion of the foreigner: "I am constantly threatened" by those who exist outside the legal state, so I have the right to "force" them to agree with me, encompassing their "world" into mine, or, if they refuse to do so, to ban them from my coexistence, depriving them of all the rights enjoyed by my fellow citizens. Peace or extermination; therefore, xenocide.
Does this mean, then, that Kant does not conceive the existence of any other species of people as politically valid as that of the cosmopolitan man? But how to determine "what is Man", if he is taken as the only person as such? Is it possible to establish what is proper to a species or people by lowering all foreigners to their subform or antiform (discontinuous, convergent) and, therefore, dispensing any positive nexus of foreignness (divergent, continuous)?
In Anthropology from a pragmatic point of view, Kant confronts this capital problem by appealing to extraterrestrial rational beings as a term of comparison to determine the specificity of the human being:
In order to characterize a species of beings, two things are requires: we have to apprehend it together with other species we are acquainted with under on concept, and to state its characteristic property (proprietas)--the quality by which it differs from the other species--and use this as our basis for distinguishing it from them.--But if we are comparing a a kind of being that we know (A) with another that we do not know (non-A), how can we expect or demand to state the character of the one we know, when we have no middle term for the comparison (tertium comparationis)?--Let the highest specific concept be that of a terrestrial rational being: we cannot name its character because we have no knowledge of non-terrestrial rational beings that would enable us to indicate theis characteristic property and so to characterize terrestrial rational beings amon rational beings in general.--It seems, then, that the problem of indicating the character of the human species is quite insoluble; for to set about solving it, we should have to compare two species of rational beigns through experience, and experience does not present us with a second sich species. (3) Comparison with others, taken as a "foundation of differentiation", is a condition for determining the identity and character of a subject. However, according to Kant, in the case of the human species, considered as the only rational on Earth, comparison is impossible because it would lack "experience". Due to the scarcity of rationality among terrestrial species, only beings from outside the Earth could represent the foundation capable of assuring humanity of its complete determination. As long as no contact with extraterrestrial beings was established (by invading their worlds or being visited by them?), the anthropological question would remain "absolutely insoluble."
It is remarkable that Kant simply excludes the possibility of defining the character of humanity by reference to other living species on Earth. As if, although the human world is part of the whole of life, the planet was outside the Kantian Cosmopolis. As absurd as it may be, the philosopher is unequivocal on this point, even going so far as to identify cosmology with anthropology: if "in the world, the most important object to which man can apply them is the human being, because he is his own ultimate end"...
Para continuar a ler
PEÇA SUA AVALIAÇÃOCOPYRIGHT GALE, Cengage Learning. All rights reserved.
