STUTTERING IN ONE’S OWN LANGUAGE: ANTI-IDENTITARIAN ANTHROPOPHAGY AS A DISRUPTION OF EPISTEMIC DOMINATION^*

ABSTRACT:

Stuttering in One’s Own Language: Anti-identitarian Anthropophagy as a Disruption of Epistemic Domination. This article aimed to articulate the inherent dialectics of self-constitution through encounters with the other, employing the concepts of narcissistic wounds and oceanic feeling. Subsequently, a case problem is presented, which questions the limits of identity construction for subalternized subjects marked by the colonial discourse. The colonial discourse operates through a hierarchical ontological distribution, promoting a division between ‘us’ and ‘them,’ presupposing the fundamental attribute of lack for the colonized. This ontological distribution relies on the presupposition of a hierarchy of knowledge and discourses that both repress the production of knowledge and sign systems of the dominated and mythify those of the dominators. The case at hand highlights internal colonialism in its dual determination: being and knowledge, prompting scrutiny of identification processes between autophagy and anthropophagy. It also raises questions about how it is possible to articulate a resistant discourse that is not compromised by dominant powers.

Keywords:
Otherness; identity; coloniality; epistemic domination; anthropophagy

RESUMO:

O artigo em tela tem como finalidade articular a dialética inerente à constituição do eu a partir do encontro com o outro com as noções de ferida narcísica e sentimento oceânico. Em seguida, apresenta-se um caso-problema que interroga os limites da construção identitária dos sujeitos subalternizados, marcados pelo discurso colonial, o qual opera a partir de uma distribuição ontológica hierárquica promotora da divisão entre nós e eles, e cujo pressuposto é a noção de falta como atributo fundamental dos colonizados. Tal distribuição ontológica repousa, portanto, na pressuposição de uma hierarquia dos saberes e discursos que tanto reprime a produção de conhecimentos e dos sistemas de signo dos dominados quanto mitifica àquela dos dominadores. O caso em tela coloca em evidência o colonialismo interno em sua dupla determinação: do ser e do saber, e nos leva a problematizar os processos de identificação entre a autofagia e a antropofagia, bem como ao questionamento dos modos pelos quais é possível articular uma fala de resistência que não esteja comprometida pelo discurso e pelos poderes dominantes.

Palavras-chave:
alteridade; identidade; colonialidade; dominação epistêmica; antropofagia

From the Narcissistic Wound to the Oceanic Feeling: the self to the edges of itself

Many Freudian assertions have had some impact on the field of culture. With fluid writing, the author never received the desired recognition from scientific circles. However, he was awarded the Goethe Prize for literature, which did not fail to cause him some discomfort. Although he did not neglect poets and writers, on the contrary, Freud (1996/1907) admired their ability to anticipate what would only be “discovered” by academic knowledge much later, since, about “knowledge of the soul”, they drew on material not yet accessible to the scientific community: “creative writers are very valuable allies [of the psychoanalyst], whose testimony must be taken into high regard, as they tend to know a wide range of things between heaven and earth which our philosophy has not yet allowed us to dream about” (FREUD, 1996/1907, p. 20). Freud did not suppose himself to be one of them.

A contemporary of the psychoanalyst, poet Fernando Pessoa repeatedly and insistently exposed the false sovereignty of the self, the alienating and illusory character of this fictional unity, and its entirely other, external nature, starting with the many heteronyms he created throughout his works. Pessoa had been many other people. The self that wants to be an individual, in it, asserted itself as an anonymous multitude: “I created in myself several personalities... [S]uch I externalized myself within myself, that within me I only exist externally. I am the naked scene where several actors play various parts,” (PESSOA, 2011, p. 288). This short excerpt from The Book of Disquiet, written under the semi-heteronym of Bernardo Soares between 1913 and Pessoa’s death in 1935, is contemporary with the constitution of the self as a basic concept of psychoanalysis in Freud’s work.

The constitution of psychoanalysis as a field of knowledge is marked by stripping away the totalitarian pretension of the dominance of consciousness in the mental life of individuals, as expressed by the tradition of the subject’s philosophy, in favor of another reality, unconscious, whose lack of knowledge does not eliminate its importance. In place of consciousness as a being of the subject, Freudian discourse offered the unconscious as a being of the psyche (BIRMAN, 1997), outlining a new topology for the psyche, whose necessary consequence was the hypothesis of a structuring division of the subject. However, the decentering of consciousness to the unconscious operated by Freud at the heart of the first topic represented only the first step towards another, more radical one, which would involve all expressions of the subject. It remained to call into question the instance of the self as sovereign in regulating the psyche.

However, with the publication of Introduction to Narcissism in 1914 and the proposition that there is an investment made by the Self in itself, the conception of this instance opens up not only as a subject since it is still linked to consciousness but fundamentally as an object. The radicality of this conception lies in the denaturalization of the Self, which becomes inscribed in the order of the other, i.e., the Self would not always compose psychic life but needs to be developed in the dialectical process that ties the subject to the multiplicity of objects that make up their world. This means that the Self is, from the outset, displaced about itself, leaving it, as a possibility, to take itself as an object and invest libidinally in itself, just as it invests in objects in the external world.

It is worth mentioning that Freud (1914) places narcissism as an intermediate stage between the anarchism of partial drives - which come from relying on vital needs and the intervention of the external other - typical of autoeroticism as a stage of sexuality devoid of unitary reference, i.e., which dispenses with identitarian construction and libidinal investment in external objects. Narcissism would be the result of this “new psychic action” put into operation by the interference of the other and essential, therefore, to the constitution of the self, whose first consequence was its relocation in the theory of drives since the introduction to narcissism would be responsible for the organization of anarchic partial drives around a unified image of the self, invested, in principle, by this other external to the organism:

A unity comparable to the self cannot exist in the individual from the beginning; the self has to be developed. Autoerotic instincts, however, are there from the beginning, and, therefore, something must be added to autoeroticism (a new psychic action) to provoke narcissism (FREUD, 1996/1914, p. 84).

Narcissism acquires primary importance in mental life, as it organizes the libido around a totality that, in principle, will be the Self, the stronghold of all eroticism as a feeling of oneself, even if restricted to bodily limits. In Birman’s words, “the constitution of the self would only take place through the anticipation and investment of parental figures in the child’s organism, in order to transform auto-erotism into narcissism” (BIRMAN, 1997, p. 31). This first moment of investment in oneself will be represented by Freud as the formation of the ideal self as a consequence of the revival of the parents’ lost narcissism, who begin to invest in the baby’s figure. Thus, while parents attribute all perfections and plenitudes to the baby, idealizing them, the baby identifies with the ideal that is attributed to them, going from helplessness to omnipotence thanks to the love directed at them. The psychological “myself,” before constituting itself as a subject, appears as if by the effect of an object that was loved, that is, from the recognition offered to it by the gaze and desire of the other.

In this way, the ability to extend oneself to the world already presupposes the constitution of oneself in dependence on another: there is only Self as an organizational unit of drives where there is narcissistic investment; there is only narcissism where there are partial drives; there are no drives where the investment of a third party did not intervene. Therefore, the notion of Self does not end in an individuality closed in on itself because taking oneself as an object of investment, as carried out in narcissism, highlights the precedence of otherness over identity and, more radically, the precedence of heteronomy over autonomy. The Self, as the subject’s place of affirmation, is also the place of his alienation, as Lacan (1998a) will later say.

Freud (1996/1917) knew the impact of these statements. In the text A Difficulty on the Path of Psychoanalysis, the author profiles himself alongside Nicolaus Copernicus and Charles Darwin, whose discoveries inflicted a narcissistic wound on humanity by exposing man’s geocentric, anthropocentric, and, with Freud, rational, and conscientialist pretensions. As Fernando Pessoa wrote, “There are metaphors that are more real than the people walking down the street” (PESSOA, 2011, p. 479). Using metaphors, Freud explains the impact of such discoveries as producing a narcissistic wound as a way of pointing out the blow caused to the image of autonomy formulated by man regarding himself. The metaphor of the wound is not new; it had already been used by Freud (1996/1895, p. 258) long before, in Draft G, when referring to melancholy as an ailment in which the excitations would suffer a “retraction into the psychic sphere, which produces a suction effect on the contiguous quantities of excitation. (...) with this, an impoverishment of excitement sets in - an internal hemorrhage (...) that acts in an inhibiting way, like a wound” (FREUD, 1996/1895, p. 258). By choosing the image of a narcissistic wound, Freud is saying that, in addition to not having autonomy as one of its predicates, there are serious obstacles to the unlimited expansion of the Self, obstacles that are a consequence of its own constitution.

We could oppose this narcissistic wound, which “acts in an inhibiting way,” retracting the Self and preventing its omnipotent dissolution, by defining and limiting its borders, even if precariously, to the “oceanic feeling,” the subject of debate long after, in 1929, in Civilization and Its Discontents, between Freud and his poet friend Romain Rolland, who defines it as:

a feeling of “eternity,” a feeling like something without limits, without barriers, “oceanic,” so to speak. This feeling would be a purely subjective fact and not an article of faith; (...) therefore, a feeling of inseparable connection and belonging to the entirety of the external world (FREUD, 2020/1929, pp. 306 - 307).

While Rolland links the “oceanic feeling” to religiosity and the feeling of belonging to the whole, Freud draws a parallel between that and the “excessive narcissism” present in children and primitive man¹, which attribute exceptional powers to their ideas and thoughts, supposedly capable of influencing the course of external events through a magical force. Unlike the poet, the psychoanalyst stands alongside scientists, notably those who relocated man to much more modest positions, well short of eternity, the universal or reason.

If the narcissistic wound can be contrasted with the oceanic feeling, it is because both are related to the borders, insufficiencies, dependencies, and relationships that constitute the Self as a traveler adrift of its destiny, always contingent and wandering. The third narcissistic wound of humanity proposed by psychoanalysis would represent a psychic wound, as it forced the man to recognize himself as not being the master and sovereign Self that he was supposed to be.

In this case, Freud, the non-poet, anticipated Pessoa in this open wound when he enunciates a Self that is only possible by differing from himself. The poet, however, would agree with his contemporary: “I am a traveler who suddenly finds himself in a strange village, without knowing how I got there; and these cases come to mind of people who lose their memory, and they are others for a long time. I was someone else for a long time - from birth and consciousness” (PESSOA, 2011, p. 75).

The radical proposition of psychoanalysis displaces the Self not only from the center of psychic experience but also deviates it from itself because to affirm the anteriority of otherness about identity is to take the self as an instance populated by many others: “<< most of us are other people >>, said Oscar Wilde, and he said it well” (PESSOA, 2011, p. 273). Pessoa will also say:

Everything I have done, thought, and been is a sum of subordinations, either to a false entity that I considered mine because I acted from it outside or to a weight of circumstances that I assumed was the air I breathed. I am, at this moment of seeing, a sudden loner who recognizes himself exiled from where he has always been a citizen. Most intimately, I thought it wasn’t me. Then comes to me a sarcastic terror of life, a dismay that goes beyond the limits of my conscious individuality (PESSOA, 2011, p. 75)

Not being the master of its own home, the Self asserts itself in psychoanalysis as a border instance whose hinges keep it porous to the various crossings. The intrapsychic division that is effected in the instances of the ideal self, ideal of me, and superego put into debate the destinies of the Other in the constitution of the subject, but not only. Freud’s insistence on the metaphor of the narcissistic wound as a counterpoint to the antipathy directed towards the oceanic feeling is indicative of the importance of the Self in the interpretation of our modes of psychic illness but, equally, the models of its foundation can help us understand our forms of socialization, not through a psychologization of the social, on the contrary, through the recognition of the anthropogenesis to which the Self is tributary. From this arise Freud’s efforts to mark the inseparability between individual Psychology and collective Psychology, we would say contemporaneously, between the processes of subjectivation and the forms of socialization.

In this sense, while the narcissistic wound can function as an opening to the other’s field by exposing the insufficiencies of the Self and sending it to the beyond in the form of ideas, the oceanic feeling by taking the Self as the world itself, from the reactivation of the ideal self, to whose formation not only the narcissism of those who inserted the little infants into the human world contribute but also the denial of the existence of the separate other - purified pleasure-ego² - offers keys to understanding ethical, social and political processes, such as racism, xenophobia, and colonialism.

When the subaltern “intellectualizes”: are you like us?

Not many years ago, at the end of 2021, the author of this essay, a northeastern migrant-foreigner woman on southeastern university campuses, participated as a listener in a presentation of a course completion work at a public University in Rio de Janeiro. The work in question, presented to a committee specialized in constructing narratives and social struggles, aimed to deconstruct a certain essentialist notion of northeastern identity. The student put on stage the social construction of an imaginary about the northeastern people that, in his hypothesis, ended up making the multiple subjectivities and ways of being in the world of those subjects unfeasible through a double process: sometimes it subalternizes them, taking them as inhabitants of a profound, archaic and uncivilized Brazil, sometimes it heroicizes them as fearless, critical and revolutionary subjects. As the word circulated among the committee, the hypothesis gained consistency. Knowingly or inadvertently, the committee put into action the criticisms that its theory illuminates but does not warm³.

The young northeastern researcher dared to place himself as the subject of his own research, narrating the construction of a northeastern identity and his self-recognition as such - that is, as a northeasterner, this large identitarian umbrella - based on violence that confronted him with the other that differed from him, that is, his identitarian/ontological construction was only possible through a mirror imposed by the other, which, at the same time as it offered him a reflection with which it was possible to produce identification, he did so from another image, external to him, of a normative countenance toward which he could only recognize himself as a blurred portrait, which showed, in each act, the insufficiencies of its contours. Affirming himself as a Northeasterner involved accepting the badges offered to him, both as a possible welcoming movement and as a necessary action against discrimination - our young researcher, as an act of baptism on the Rio de Janeiro campus, received the nickname Sergipe, his home state, with which he was also nominated by his evaluation committee.

Such epistemic boldness earned him some criticism, among many, that the researcher’s subjectivity, when inserted in the research, “can be as oppressive as the oppression it denounces.” To complete the mise-en-scène, the supervisor took the floor to explain to her fellow professor, from the southeast and white, author of the critique, that, although she had warned the young researcher-subject-oppressor countless times, he did not give up on giving his name and accent to his text, to which the supervisor concluded: “you know how it is, right!? A northeastern person, when become intellectual, holy shit!, never stop talking again.”

Coloniality: colonization of the imaginary and symbolic repressions

Frantz Fanon (2020), in Black Skin, White Masks, alludes to some examples of prejudices against the “man of color” that promote epistemic racism, that is when the capacity to produce knowledge and the theoretical body of knowledge that guides it is called into question either by the geographical and/or metaphorical origin of this knowledge or as a result of the racial, ethnic, and cultural markers of the subject who enunciates it. Fanon offers us his experience as a teaching resource: he explains that, once, when concluding a conference in Lyon in which he drew a parallel between black poetry and European poetry, he heard from an enthusiastic Frenchman: “Deep down you are white,” that is, “The fact that I studied such an interesting problem through the language of white people gave me the status of citizenship” (FANON, 2020, p. 52).

For Fanon, colonization does not only require - and this is already a lot - the material subordination of a people; it also provides discursive supports from which people can express themselves and understand themselves. Language would, therefore, contain the promise of recognition because “speaking a language is assuming a world, a culture. The Antillean who wants to be white will be so much more so the more he has taken on as his own the cultural instrument that is language” (FANON, 2020, p. 52): the conditions for alienation and the perpetuation of epistemological colonialism are given.

As Aníbal Quijano (1992; 2005) shows us, the disappearance of historical colonialism did not imply the disappearance of colonialism as a form of sociability based on the assumption of ethnic-cultural and ontological inferiority of the other so that we would be governed by a “coloniality” (QUIJANO, 1992, p.13), supported by the imposition of an ethnic-racial classification of the population, and of which, therefore, knowledge would be a privileged instrument of oppression.

Firstly, coloniality operates from colonization of the imaginary, produced, according to the author, by powerful repression, which focused, in the foreground, on “the ways of knowing, of producing knowledge, of producing perspectives, images, and systems of images, symbols, modes of meaning”⁴ (QUIJANO, 1992, p. 12), and whose objective is not only seen as a way of inhibiting the cultural production of the colonized but also as a means of social and cultural control, given the reduced direct and brutal domination. The repression of the modes and production of knowledge of the dominated was and continues to be one of the strategies of domination; however, it was/is not the only one; it needed to be based on the mystification of the norms of production of knowledge and meaning of the dominators: first, leaving them away from the access of the dominated; then, granting partial and selective access to a few privileged people captured among the dominated, as a way of participating in instances of power held by the dominators; finally, the dominant culture became an object of seduction, as it gave access to power (QUIJANO, 1992. p. 12).

Discursive support was essential to colonial domination strategies by anchoring not only in the assumptions of the thesis of natural slavery, defended by Aristotle (2002) and reorganized by medieval Thomism (AQUINO, 1996) but mainly in the ranks of luminous rationality. The constitution of a scientific method that could give access clearly and distinctly to the objects of knowledge based on a set of rules and foundations required a systematized rationality, which purges from itself everything that does not appear to be evident - clear and distinct - to the method (DESCARTES, 2018). Thus, between the Cartesian cogito (DESCARTES, 1973), as a certainty assured after applying the method to the objects of metaphysics, and the Kantian transcendental subject (KANT, 2015), as the synthesis between the sensitive diversity and understanding, what appeared was the relationship of exteriority between the subject of knowledge and the object to be known; that, as an unreadable opacity but which, however, founds a principle of identity, as the foundation of knowledge itself; this, as data to be analyzed, ordered, categorized, known and dominated, since it is radically different from the subject who takes it as an object.

This paradigm forged the idea of an individualized subjectivity for whose constitution intersubjective and social relations would not compete. In its radicality, this proposition financed the non-recognition of any otherness that did not share the sign systems of nascent rationality to establish a relationship of contiguity between modernity and colonialism (QUIJANO, 1992; DUSSEL, 1993). Faced with the abundant differences found overseas, European colonizers asserted themselves as an identity by establishing inequalities of nature, which reifies the other by denying them the condition of the subject:

[...] Consequently, other cultures are different in the sense of being unequal, indeed inferior, by nature. They can only be “objects” of knowledge and/or practices of domination. In this perspective, the relationship between European culture and other cultures was established and has since been maintained as a relationship between “subject” and “object” (QUIJANO, 1992, p. 16).

From this perspective, Boaventura de Souza Santos (2010) states that modern Western thought is an abysmal thought as it operates through binaries based on the construction of radical lines, visible and invisible, that cut social reality between metropolitan territories and colonial territories. Thus, abyssal thinking produces and radicalizes distinctions: “The intensely visible distinctions that structure social reality on this side of the line are based on the invisibility of distinctions between this and the other side of the line” (SANTOS, 2010, p. 30). This separation occurs at an epistemological level, in which the distinction is made between modern science - as the only way of accessing the truth, belonging to the other side of the line - and magical thoughts, beliefs, and opinions, like what remains on this side of the line. However, such distinctions also refer to modes of exclusion: non-abyssal exclusions, belonging to the metropolitan world, which affect the material conditions of existence, and, on the other hand, abyssal exclusions, such as those that deny the right to recognition of the other as human, and therefore denies them the right to existence. One, social exclusion; the other, ontological. In this sense, while on the side of the metropolitan line, the social field is constituted by the tension between regulation and emancipation, the other side, colonial, is governed by the tension between appropriation - assimilation, co-optation, and incorporation of dominant ways of life - and violence - physical, material, cultural, and human destruction. Therefore, the author concludes, “Modern humanity cannot be conceived without a modern sub-humanity” (SANTOS, 2010, p. 34), in which the denial of a part of humanity acquires a sacrificial character. It is worth highlighting that these lines are not geographic but metaphorical. They scan social spaces from the global North to the South, although they practically overlap below the Equator.

Thus, in addition to brutal physical domination, colonialism, in the form of coloniality, was and continues to be an epistemological domination that suppressed knowledge of colonized peoples and places by relegating them to the condition of subalternity when it did not destroy them. This systematic destruction of knowledge located on the other side of the “abyssal line,” that is, in the colonized world, “disarmed such societies, making them incapable of representing the world as their own and on their own terms,” and therefore, as possible of change by their own means. Boaventura called this epistemological violence epistemicide. In his understanding, “coloniality [as formulated by Quijano] is the continuation of colonialism by other means,” this is because the end of political colonialism only meant its replacement by another, such as internal colonialism, racism, and xenophobia (SANTOS, 2010, p. 27).

Being devoid of predicates

To the title question of the essay Can the Subaltern Speak?, Gayatri Spivak (2010), an Indian post-colonial feminist thinker, provides us with a harsh answer: for her, the subaltern cannot speak because they cannot be heard since articulating a discourse of resistance implies the use of representations within the hegemonic discourse, it implies that there is the other of enunciation. If the subaltern subject is already the other of the enunciation precariously constituted as subjectivity - the being of lack - then they are separated from the symbolic exchange, leaving them the role of object of knowledge about them, therefore of a knowledge that escapes them. From this, for Spivak, comes the privileged positionality of the intellectual as a legitimized figure within power structures and speaking for the subaltern to represent them. For her, this ambiguous position of the intellectual who believes themselves capable of speaking on behalf of others is not representation but silencing. When the Other needs to be hidden to be apprehended, we are witnessing epistemic violence (SPIVAK, 2010) but also ontological (MALDONADO-TORRES, 2022) and societal (FANON, 2020) violence.

Returning to our young researcher. With the veil fallen, he could be recognized as a subject by his peers, but for this to happen, it was necessary to abandon his foreign subjectivity - ethnic, exotic, folkloric, needy, and confused since it was not intellectualized - and even so, with a warning stuck as a proper name that does not allow him to forget, even if temporarily, its geographical origin, as a remnant not assimilated by the dominant culture, like the abyssal lines that section it, producing furrows through which the ontological geography draws absences, like a bloodstain on the doorpost: Sergipe, BEING-people, but not as “us.” Identification that chains him to his image, imprisoning him as an “eternal victim of an essence, of an appearance for which he is not responsible” (FANON, 2020, p. 49).

Upon entering the order of the dominant discourse, his absorption as a subject takes place and can only take place if he refuses its marks and inscriptions in a world whose apprehension is only possible as an object of knowledge, as an instrument of knowledge that is external to him. The problem is that this subject, “when he intellectualizes,” i.e., when he passes from nature - the symbol of the Other - to culture - the sign of the self -, I insisted on saying there is a remnant inapprehensible by the dominant culture, by the dominant language, by the dominant subject form. To understand it, this remnant must become the subject of enunciation itself through a speech act that disarticulates the keys of interpretation that seek to represent it, which is only possible as an “oppression” or as a shock such as that produced in a child by the figure of Fanon in the streets of Paris.

I insist on this domestic example to say that epistemic violence is not just the result of the colonizer. When we handle concepts, we are talking about and describing ways of life, differentially distributing precariousness. Epistemic and ontological violence can also be the result of our subordinate mind or our intellectual self-alienation, the result of the uncritical incorporation of dominant ideologies/discourses/knowledge, which take the European subject as a universal norm that dismembers us so that we fit into their little symbolic boxes. As Quijano (2014) reminds us, Eurocentrism is not exclusive to Europeans or those dominant in capitalism but also to those educated under their hegemony.

To conclude, or how to stutter in one’s own language

Then, how can we articulate a speech of resistance that is not crossed by the dominant discourse? How to think, problematize, and resist subjection forms anchored in the speeches and forms of knowledge imposed on us as a model of rationality, operators of a disruption between us and them, between subjects who know and objects to be known? How important, if any, are identitarian markers in struggles for social, political, epistemic, and psychic emancipation? How to break with the minority (KANT, 1985) they want to impute to us, whether through the determination of relevant themes for research or the invisibility of our production, whether through the disarticulation of our discourse or the demand that it conform to the epistemological assumptions that preceded it?

If coloniality depends on the active role of the colonized through its reiteration, it is because subjection does not occur only through coercion but through the internalization and reproduction of terms and norms that guarantee our existence. This conclusion is the basis of the argument supported by Judith Butler (2017) in The Psychic Life of Power. For the author, the constitution of the subject exposes psychic subjection as a specific modality of subjection since the psychic vulnerability inherent in our condition of helplessness exposes us to social norms, which configure and produce desire as a desire for subjection. This is because the subject can be considered as a turn of power upon itself, i.e., the subject is the effect of the production of meaning in the turns of power, which is why it is not referred to an a priori entity but to a discursive effect pre-ontological, an “effect of power in retreat” (BUTLER, 2017, p. 15). According to Butler, the paradox of subjection results in the paradox of referentiality since talking about the constitution of the subject in and through subjection is talking about what does not yet exist. Then, Butler poses the question:

Then, what is desired in subjection? Is it a simple love of shackles, or is there a more complex scenario at work? How can we maintain survival if the terms guaranteeing existence are precisely those that demand and institute subordination? From this perspective, subjection is the paradoxical effect of a regime of power, in which the very “conditions of existence,” the possibility of continuing as a recognizable social being, require the formation and maintenance of the subject in subordination (Butler, 2017, p. 36).

Davi Kopenawa, in A queda do céu: palavras de um xamã yanomami (2015), gives us a moving account of his process of approaching and assimilating white culture:

[...]I really wanted to meet white people. That’s why I listened to them very carefully. (...) I tried hard to capture their words one by one, to fix them on me. But it wasn’t easy at all. It took a lot for me to put some of them together in my mind. But little by little, the ones I could recognize increased. I remained mute but was beginning to understand what the people at the station were telling me. Then, my mouth ended up losing its fear. So, I risked saying some of those strange words with my tongue twisted (KOPENAWA, 2015, pp. 2820-283).

Davi Kopenawa speaks of a long process of approximation and hesitation that takes place at the edges of oneself and in recognizing the other, of a desire to learn and grasp the otherness that confronts him with himself as an identity and, in this process, captures and manages him: “(...) Why not imitate white people and become one of them? I only wanted one thing: to look like them. So I watched them all the time in silence, with great attention. I wanted to assimilate everything they said and did” (KOPENAWA, 2015, p. 289). Davi assimilated the customs of the white man, the clothes, the accessories, and the merchandise, which fixed his thinking; he assimilated their illnesses and ways of suffering. After learning about the diseases, which almost led to his death, and “the words of the white man” (ibidem), Davi decided to return to the forest but not without understanding that “they [the whites] mistreat us only because we are different people from them. Therefore, if we try to imitate them, things will get really bad for us” (KOPENAWA, 2015, p. 289). With this warning, Kopenawa exposes the risks of an autophagic identification that only occurs through the crushing of the Self and its predicates. However, faced with the risk, he does not propose the abolition of the other: “It is also true that I know the language of white people. However, I imitate it clumsily, only when I go to the city or to talk to them in the forest” (KOPENAWA, 2015, p. 290).

Twisting the tongue, imitating it as a parody, as a way of subverting subjection. Kopenawa disarms that whose power could silence him as a subject of enunciation. He shares the symptom of language or language as a symptom, not as a law. He produces a stutter that disarticulates the signs that fix it as another identity, devoid of the predicates that guarantee equality, and, thus, reenters the order of discourse as the subject of enunciation based on the affirmation of the power of a language and an “improper identity,” which transforms “the alienating identification into a political gesture of insubmission” (RIVEIRA, p. 14). From autophagy to anthropophagy, as totemization or violation of taboo (ANDRADE, 1928). In her reading of the Anthropophagic Manifesto, psychoanalyst Tania Riveira (2020, p. 15, author’s emphasis) explains that it is in the “very question of the other, or of the self challenged as another and with the other - and a way of identification which, at the same time, constitutes an extreme assimilation and a destruction of the supposed superiority of the other, through irrelevance and parody” which is, for anthropophagy, the defining feature of Brazil, which, I add, involves a Brazilianness without the construction of identity.

Therefore, I return to the question that begins this topic: How to articulate a speech of resistance not crossed by the dominant discourse? Against the order of speech, the stuttering of the language with its fissures and loopholes, in the gaps and fables. To stutter in one’s own language, as a foreigner, is to allow oneself to be crossed by the intensities, the affects, the history, and what it silences; it is to incorporate the absences that cloak the voice and make it a mere speaking apparatus, it is to have the daring to interject into the dominant discourses a speech free from fear, a discourse strongly marked by the revolt against dominations as it is forged in the real battles to which we are summoned daily: a discourse capable of questioning the very ontological status to which we are linked, which reverberates in the words the affection indicated (DELEUZE, 2011) as a way of making the subject emerge apart from their discourse, a speech that points out, at the same time, “the tension in language and the limit of language” (DELEUZE, 2011, p. 144). It is not about the abolition of signs, rationalities, symbolic and imagery systems that constituted our ways of representing the world but rather about operating tensions, twists, and expansions within this rationality itself.

In the Global South, such boldness needs to be attentive to the complexities of our historical-social configuration and our precariousness; it has to be accompanied by the distrust that all knowledge is local and situated (KILOMBA, 2019), that is, it reflects the configurations, prejudices, experiences, and knowledge of a space delimited by a specific time. Ailton Krenak teaches us that the resistance of the original peoples of Brazil five hundred years ago colonization was only possible because “we resisted by expanding our subjectivity, not accepting this idea that we are all equal.” If we can assert the difference, “If we can do this, we will be postponing the end” (KRENAK, 2020, p. 31).

Contemporary Brazilian authors, such as Birman (2000; 2013) and Safatle (2016), insist on the productive dimension of helplessness - this narcissistic wound that never ceases to show us, as a laudatory witness, our insufficiencies - as a social operator from which it is possible to open up to the field of otherness. Thus, the construction of political projects of emancipation would necessarily involve the assumption of helplessness “since that is the result in the subjectivity of a world that is no longer founded on totalizing and universalizing ideas” (BIRMAN, 2000, p. 95) and by refusing subjective models strongly anchored in the sense of personal identity:

Being helpless means allowing yourself to be open to an affection that strips me of the predicates that identify me. Therefore, an affection that confronts me with impotence that is, in fact, a form of expression of the collapse of powers that always produce the same acts, always the same agents (SAFATLE, 2016, p. 21).

To the detriment of autophagic alterity, which is processed by the uncritical incorporation of ideas, totems, taboos, rationalities, discourses, and knowledge from others and elsewhere, which end up mutilating the capacity for composition and expression of other possible worlds, transfiguring themselves in mere replicas made pale by the tropic sun, anthropophagic alterity, which totemizes or violates the taboo (ANDRADE, 1970/1928), swallows, regurgitates, and incorporates but from a body - theoretical, political, ethical, cultural - situated: “Only Anthropophagy unites us!” (ANDRADE, 1970/1928), the poet screams. Neither self-absorbed nor dissolved in a supposed oceanic totality (national/cultural/linguistic/regional) of equals. Anthropophagy, whose fundamental principle is the recognition of oneself and others in their radical singularity.

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• *
  This article is the result of discussions initiated during the doctoral program and further developed in postdoctoral research. It received funding from the Carlos Chagas Filho Foundation for Research Support of the State of Rio de Janeiro (FAPERJ), under the Postdoctoral Program Scholarship Nota 10, process code E26/205.790/2022, and from the Coordination for the Improvement of Higher Education Personnel (CAPES), in the form of a doctoral scholarship

• 1
  Despite Freud’s anthropocentric approach when referring to a supposed archaism of the mind of “primitive man,” it would be enough for the author to look at the magical practices present in European culture, such as the belief in divine omnipotence, in the holy trinity, in the resurrection, etc.
• 2
  By presenting, in the Three Essays on Sexuality, the destinies to which drives are subject, Freud (2017/1905) establishes the existence of three polarities that govern mental life, namely, the opposition between subject (self) and object (world); between displeasure and pleasure and, finally, between the active and the passive. The complex web of these polarities will be decisive for the subject’s positionality in the world because he will assimilate the self to that which is pleasurable, introjecting, through instinctual activity, the objects of the world that appear to him as such, and, in the same way, he will perceive how everything that is a source of displeasure is foreign to him, projecting it onto the world. Therefore, it is through the introjection of what they perceive in others that the individual assigns themselves a place in the world. Passive about the external world and active every time they seek to modify it, the self constitutes itself (perceiving itself), through this instinctual activity, as a “purified pleasure-ego” (FREUD, 1996/1905, p. 55), entirely dominated by the pleasure principle. We can locate the ideal self as corresponding to this purified pleasure-ego of the Three Essays, given that here there is a split of both the self and the world between a part experienced as alien and expelled from the self and a part of the world introjected and incorporated into the self, as a source of pleasure. The self, for instance, begins to coincide with what is pleasurable, even if located outside the biopsychological individual, and the object, with displeasure, even if the displeasure comes from a drive source. The boundaries between internal and external are blurred. If we remember the oceanic feeling, the feeling of the individual’s dissolution in the world is nothing more than the incorporation of the world by the self, its indistinction, that is, a return to the ideal self, as the purified pleasure-ego, which contains within itself all the perfections: “we recognize as the first among these phases [of development of drives] that of incorporating or devouring, as a form of love incompatible with the suspension of existence separate from the object” (Freud, 1996/1905, p. 61, author’s emphasis).
• 3
  I owe this metaphor of neon theory, which illuminates but does not warm, to the reading of A cidade dos sábios, by Luiz Antonio Baptista (1999).
• 4
  Free translation: “the ways of knowing, of producing knowledge, of producing perspectives, images and systems of images, symbols, modes of meaning”.

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  11 Dec 2023
• Date of issue
  2023

History

• Received
  30 Sept 2023
• Accepted
  15 Nov 2023