Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
man be black; he must be black in relation to the white man.”
3
Is it any
surprise that the myth of cosmological alterity is then celebrated as “the
ontological self-determination of the Other”?
4
Taking the tension between Ayoreo actualities and their epistemic
trappings seriously means an unsettling confrontation with such mask-
ing myths. Signs of a domesticated cosmological alterity are nowhere to
be found—at least not yet. Impossible to ignore, however, are the many
ways that precisely these kinds of logics sustain, naturalize, and repro-
duce stark inequalities in the value and meaning of human life. Cultural-
ism in its many reinvigorated guises now operates as an effective regime
of what Didier Fassin calls “biolegitimacy.” For Fassin, contemporary bio-
politics are best defined not so much as coherent technologies for nor-
malizing and controlling living beings but as the recent creation of sharp
inequalities within “life as such.” These bioinequalities manifest how
authority flows through a new politics of life, in which the global pursuit
of contradictory ideal definitions of moral life requires an active process
of deciding “who should live and in the name of what.”
5
It is a biopolitics
predicated on rupture and discontinuity, on the vertical ranking of moral
judgments, on blocked gradients and profound contradictions. It is pre-
cisely this kind of instrumental disorder that the contemporary politics of
