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tion and the “distorted characteristics of the victimizer” are imputed to
the victims. 36 The instrumental incoherence upon which colonial vio-
lence depends is disguised and expanded.
According to these culturalist logics, the need for a moral remedia-
tion of ex-primitives spurs movements to safeguard a culture neglected
or imperiled by its former possessors. 37 This is a colonizing operation
that is crucial for the accumulations and expenditures of contemporary
humanitarianisms and the emergence of culture as both a regime of bio-
legitimacy and a political theology animated by giving mass death the
sanctity of life itself. 38 Culture is redeployed not as an empirical reality in
need of a more precise catalogue of its contents or a more effective polic-
ing of its boundaries, but as a sustaining metanarrative of a governmental
system whereby the tenets of democratic liberalism remain the exclusive
purview of the privileged few, even while increasing inequality and am-
plified forms of dispossession define the lives of most.
Negative Immanence
Yet the peculiar play of order and disorder—of knowledge and nonknowl-
edge—upon which culturalist violence depends is also generative of new
relational ontologies among those it targets.
It is perhaps telling that these disordered Ayoreo ontological responses
are not aimed against the logics of culturalism (yet) but at the epistemic
murk of a revitalized colonial space of death. At this extreme convergence
of exclusionary politics, madness and vice, the sensibilities of drug delir-
ium and moral failure coalesce into something like an emergent Ayoreo
formation of becoming. This process posits a new transformation of the
human; it presumes that the Christian Ayoreo is not suitable for survival
in the conditions of actually existing Cojñone-Gari . It takes the moral
value of rupture and the capacity for self-transformation to the breaking
point and doubles them back upon themselves. Whether it surges from
the smoke of coca paste or the terrible exhaust of an airplane, urusori is
the loss of the ayipie , the untethering of flesh and the spirit of moral hu-
manity, the reflection of a colonial image of otherness and the shattering
of a colonial mirror of production at the same time.
It is pure transgression, an inverted state of being associated with the
savage, the animal, the contaminated, the contagious, the filthy, the ab-
ject, the abhorrent, the uncanny, the feared, the enemy, the Other, the
past, the repressed, the agent, the spirits of the sun. It is a doubly or tri-
ply negative image, a form of negative historical consciousness rendered
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