Chalmers Conferences, Transvaluation: Making the world matter

Thinking Thought Otherwise: Cannibal Metaphysics and The Resistance to Ideal Form
Fiona Curran

Last modified: 2015-08-17

Abstract


This paper focuses on Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s notion of Cannibal Metaphysics and the use of indigenous alter-anthropologies that offer the possibility to think thought otherwise than the dominant frameworks of Western modernity. It traces the use of cannibalism across thinking and making, exploring the work of Brazilian artist Hélio Oiticica and his imaginative spatial and material practices that establish relational ecologies between humans and nonhumans. Ecology is foregrounded as a necessary precondition for thought’s possibility. The concept of ‘Nature’ is contested as a foundational concept to enable modes of imaginative worlding to emerge that significantly challenge Western intellectual frameworks, depriving them of their universality and therefore transforming knowledge. “Cannibal alterity” is mapped as a political act of transgression where values are devoured in order to subvert their meanings, unsettle their cultural dominance and oppressive force, to transform their negative and destructive power into new creative and productive forms.

Keywords


Ecology; Materiality; Cannibalism; Decolonialism; Ethics

References


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