Marcia Sá Cavalcante Schuback (MC): The original idea of this session was a dialogue between Achille Mbembe and Jean-Luc Nancy on the question of the end of the world. The idea was to bring together these two very significant voices of and for our contemporaneity, to listen how, if, and to what extent the question of the end of the world is indeed a question belonging to our world. Unfortunately, Jean-Luc Nancy could not attend the conference and have this dialogue because of health problems. Achille proposed then to have a dialogue with me instead, having in mind another dialogue, the one between Jean-Luc Nancy and Federico Ferrari, published last year in French with the title La Fin des Fins,1 The End of Ends. This incident recalled to me a short story told by a great Brazilian anthropologist, Darcy Ribeiro. Working with Brazilian Indians, Ribeiro was once asked to move a tribe from one reserve to another. In order to prepare this move, he had to first visit the new place with the chief of the tribe and see if the chief would accept this new place and the dislocation that it would implicate. They took a flight together. During the flight—which was the first one in the chief’s life—Ribeiro observed that every time a question was posed to the chief, he never answered to the person who had asked the question but to a third invisible or anonymous person who was not there. It was a conversation of three, not two. The question was then: Who is this third? So let us start then, having Jean-Luc Nancy with us as the question about this third absent presence in every dialogue.
Achille, during the last two days we have discussed quite a lot the discourses, the techniques, and the methods of the end of the world and also about the end of the world as a method of inquiry. We have also discussed how to understand this “of” in the expression “the end of the world,” if it should be interpreted as a subjective or objective genitive. I also asked myself if it is right to speak of the end of the world. Thereby we touch upon the necessity to discuss the difference between a discourse about the end of the world and the end of a world, and furthermore about the ends of worlds, in plural. However, and despite the importance to introduce the question of the plurality of worlds here, we keep the figure of the end of the world. Indeed, the book by Nancy and Ferrari that we are supposed to take into account speaks about the world that envelops and englobes various worlds. My first question is rather a proposal to discuss the relation between the unity of a world and the plurality of worlds. In the European media, we hear continuously about the need to find a new form to sustain the world, to sustain each one and everyone, for the sake of keeping the desire to be continuously the center, for the sake of preserving what we could call the desire of centrism. It is a question recalling old mythologies of both Phoenix and Proteus, that is, of rebirth from the ashes and of transforming a matrix of form and formation. In these discussions, we can witness Europe looking for means to be born again, of integrating the transformation of parameters in order to regain its place as the center of the world. Achille, you have written quite a lot in your books, for instance, in Sortir de la Grande Nuit, essai sur l’Afrique décolonisée and Critique de la Raison Négre, that Europe is no longer the center of the world. How to understand this affirmation? Should we say that Europe is no longer the center of the world because Europe is disseminated everywhere or because there is an outside of Europe, in the search of becoming the new center, and hence of reproducing this very longing for a center, this longing of centrism, that has characterized Europe for centuries? What do we have now, a politics of decentralization or, rather, a politics of recentralization?
Achille Mbembe (AM): Initially, I would like to thank both Marcia and Susanna for this kind invitation. As Marcia has explained, the purpose was a conversation with Jean-Luc Nancy that many of us have been reading and counting upon since many years. Our great wish is that Nancy remains with us as long as possible. So, if the condition for that is that he is not here with us, we accept it with joy.
I will not answer directly to the very important questions that you have proposed but will integrate them in the series of remarks I will make right away. The idea was from the beginning to have a conversation and not to come here to read a ready text. I will remain faithful to the spirit of conversation, which implies that I will take the risks that belong to this kind of exercise, namely, making approximations, reductions, hesitations, et cetera.
I would like to begin by saying that the question of the end of the world should be left open and not be closed or defined in a certain sense. Second, I must confess that this question intrigues me partially because of my personal education, which was a Christian one. This question leaves me if not perplexed, for sure very skeptical. One of the reasons is the one that you have proposed yourself, and to which I would like to add two or three more. The first one—and to which you have made some steps in its direction—is that there is not only one world. The second is that we cannot think as if there was only one world or only one form of consciousness of the world. In consequence, not only the question of the world must remain open, but even the one about the world as an a priori. The third point is that the archives of this world in plural are themselves also plural—a multiplicity of worlds, a multiplicity of archives, if we wish to resume this idea in a simple formula.
If we accept then that there is a multiplicity of worlds and a multiplicity of archives, it is also possible to admit that there are worlds that are finishing and others that are emerging and others that are in different situations from these as well. It is this simultaneity that should be thought. We cannot think the question about the end of the world as if it did not comprehend structurally, its own inverse in itself, namely the question about the emergence of the world, the world of another, and another world, and so on.
I begin making this remark as a response to your first question. However, it is necessary to qualify what I have said. This should be done recalling that humanity—it is interesting to observe that since yesterday a lot has been said about man but not about the human and humanity—inhabits the same planet as many other kinds of living beings, other living beings that theoretically could be considered as having as much right over this planet as we do. The question that follows this observation is then: Does the fact of being a cohabitant of this world, does this fact render this world a common world? In other words: This world, at least, the only one that until now we “have,” and despite some projects of expatriation to another planet, do we really have this world as a shared world? I would say of course both yes and no. Because, on the one hand, since modern times there is no longer a history of a here that is not simultaneously and inexorably a history of a there. It is no longer possible to tell histories from here that are not also histories from there. There is no longer a here that is not together with its inverse; moreover, what characterizes modern times is the very dispersion of peoples, of nations, or, to use this difficult term, of races.
I think that the main feature of what we call modern times is that they are inaugurated under the sign of dispersion, of pushing into movement, pushing into convulsion, under the fire of capitalism, vast cycles of planetary migration, of forced migrations of course but also voluntary migrations, and further migrations provoked by the violence of wars, conversions to monotheistic religions, the desire for capital and its precondition, namely, the accumulation of workforces. This huge exodus—to use this biblical term—is moreover far from being finished. Everywhere we see, coming from different parts of the world, images that could be called “African,” because today the image of African misery can be encountered everywhere. In these images we see indeed images of a world in flight, images of the faraway becoming the very heart of Europe. The outside of Europe is inside Europe. Because this exodus is not finished, the world about which we are talking here is the product of a vast circulating movement that coming to a tremendous upheaval did not leave intact any region of the earth, anyone. Even if this movement does not affect the whole earth with the same intensity, there will be no stone that will not have been touched by it.
Therefore, I would like to propose and to put on the table, with these observations of mine, that we can only face these questions through circulation. Circulation is that through which our modern world comes into existence. The constitution of the modern world has to be found within movement and circulation. This means of course that without circulation there is no world. And, by consequence, that if we want to assume this world as a common world, if we want to think of the world as what we must share as cohabitants, it is necessary to claim for the right of circulation as a universal right because there is no world without the universal right of circulation, the universal right of sojourn. Hence, for me, when we speak about the end of the world, referring to Heidegger, who has been absolutely present in the former talks, what comes to my mind is the universal right of circulation. At the end of the world would be then the incapacity of having the universal right of circulation. Today there are those who have the right to go where they want and those who do not have the right to residence. Hence, the world only comes to existence through an originary act of convulsion and displacement that implies dislocation, uprootedness, and undoubtedly de-territorialization. Further, also through an act of recentralization, because you have evoked this term. Recentralization, however, can only be relative. It only makes sense inside a dialectics of de-centering and re-centering. I think you are quite right when you say that the European problem today is that Europe cannot embrace its own decentralization, since it seems incapable of letting go, of abandoning its desire and will of being the captain, a desire and will that have defined Europe for centuries. The world that is before us is a world that refuses to give to Europe the status of captain. We don’t want any longer Europe as our captain. I take this term of captaincy from Derrida precisely from his reflections on the European condition, a text written during the years of the cold war.
We could prolong the question you have asked in many ways. But I would like to propose others. Indeed, others about the archives of the world which are, once again taking a Derridean terminology, what should be thought of as archives to come, archives of a world to be constituted as being in common and hence the one that requires from us, by principle and by necessity, that we must share it. I would like to insist on the question of sharing. If we take seriously the idea of archives of the world, of types of a world in circulation, types that are themselves in circulation, it should be added that the concept or idea of the end of the world is a totally regional concept. I would even say provincial. It is a concept that depends almost exclusively on one sole region of the world. And because this concept depends almost exclusively on a sole region of the world, we cannot become aware of the conditions of a multiple world in circulation remaining only in this position.
Moreover, the violence underlying this kind of gesture is that, precisely for being regional and provincial, it constitutes a discourse that pretends to be universal. Hence, if we pay attention to the totality of the archives of the world, it is not true that humanity in its whole has attributed such a place to the subject of the end of the world. It is not true. Where I come from—I don’t even know where I come from—where I was born, in central Africa, which is a very old region, a region of millions and millions of years, men and women have existed in this region for thousands of years, telling stories, having their cults, singing their songs, and playing their music. This kind of production of humanity presents archives of the unwritten that show that archives are not only the written ones. In this kind of archive you will never find a single article about the end of the world. This does not exist at all. And not only there. Indeed in other regions of the world, the concept of the end of the world does not exist. Hence, there are cultures that don’t have a place for this notion, human cultures that think that the world does not finish and that what constitutes the marvel of the world is precisely that it does not end—that there is no end, no frontier of the world, that it is inexhaustible. There is no end of the world, no end of time. Contrary to what certain anthropologists have thought, this does not mean that the world is eternal and that everything is repetitive and cyclical. It means, very differently, that by definition the world is an openness upon the unexpected, a migration toward the unforeseen. That means that the “event,” a term that has been used very often in this conference, is precisely what cannot be foreseen. It is not what arrives but what cannot be foreseen, measured, calculated, and is intrinsically connected with the subject of incalculability that Jean-Luc Nancy discusses, for instance, in After Fukushima.2 This means that in these cultures, the proper of the “true human,” these terms in quotation marks, of course, is the cultivation of a disposition and capacity for the unexpected. In consequence, this “true human” is the one, to recall the Gospels—our question is a question relying on the Gospels, we shall not forget—that does not know the hour nor the day, being in a permanent state of wakefulness and watchfulness of the night before (veille). The one who is waken, who is in this night-before-state, so to speak, is the one who can be called a “voyant,” a sighted one, even a prophet, but above all a witness.
MC: You are right about the non-universality of the question about the end of the world, and that the desire of rendering it universal confirms indeed how it is regional and even provincial. However, I would like to add another “archive,” to use your and Derrida’s notion, the archive of the so-called New World. In some narratives of the Maya that were kept alive in the oral tradition during some centuries and that were also written down and thereby conserved,3 we can hear how colonization was experienced by those who were attacked and destroyed precisely as the end of the world, the end of the universe, and even as the end of time. The Maya described the devastating encounter with the Europeans, whom they called dzulos, “the foreigners,” as the experience of the “castration of the sun,” and the learning of fear. The end of the world, of the universe, of time, experienced in the encounter with the Conquistadores is the experience of what Europeans have called the “new” world, the world built upon fear and under a castrated sun. I think we should also meditate awhile about the designation of a “new” world. This word is the sign of a substitution, I would suggest. The history of colonization is the history of oppression by means of a primary substitution, the substitution of the concept of new for the naked. Unable to face the naked world, the naked man, nakedness, as such, European history had to construct the destructive rational mythology of the new and of progress. In the essay called “On the Cannibals,” Montaigne gives us hints to see and think this substitution further. Reading this essay between the lines, it is possible to see how the Europeans respond to the nakedness of the Amerindians with the construction of the idea of Greece. As idealized, searched back-forward by sixteenth-century Europe, the Greek is the naked European, a graciously dressed European, a filter through which nakedness is denaturalized. In Montaigne’s essay, we can read between the lines that the invention of Greece in the Renaissance and its development in the Modern Age is a response to this primordial revolution, to this cataclysm, which is the encounter with the naked man, the naked world. The response was the construction of Greece as the origin of Europe.
AM: Let me also add something about this “new” world. If we consider the historical fact of slavery, which can also be understood as the experience of the end of the world, the question is not really how to live in the expectation of the end of the world but how to live within an end of the world that has already taken place, how to live the day after the end of the own world, how we live the loss of the world that was ours. Not only the loss, however, but how I lose the world the day after the end of the world and how the need to face this question is made in urgency because this cannot wait. Indeed, this is a question posed by many people outside Europe today. In the rest of the world, in the actual conditions we are facing, millions of people are asking how to make a life after the loss of their world, a loss that can never be recovered, a loss without a way back. An absolute loss, radical, is the point. Saying that, I am thinking about South Africa, where I live, and where for more than 350 years, people have had the experience of a radical loss. They have experienced Apartheid, and they have no guarantee at all to recover whatsoever they have lost, and what they have lost has no price. Nonetheless, people have to continue to live; one must continue to weave the fabric and nets of life.
MC: A lot of questions arise from what you have said. One question is related to the important thought that there is no world in singular, that the world is plural. A lot is being discussed today about this plurality, about the plural, and also about the singular plural, as Jean-Luc Nancy proposed to turn, in a radical manner, several of the actual debates. The plural, plurality, has very significant political, philosophical, ontological, aesthetical, and even religious dimensions. However, there is a question that remains quite unsolved, I think: the one concerning the ambiguity of the One. In attempts to break down the logic of the hegemonic one—one world, the world, bringing the logic of each one, the logic of a world in plural, of worlds—the “one” implied here remains paradoxically connected to the One. But maybe the problem lies not so much on the “one” or on the opposition between plural and singular but rather in the substantive meaning of “world” that is kept without discussion in both “cases.” Heidegger, to return again to him, spoke of the worlding of the world, die Welt weltet, turning our attention to how “world” should be rather thought of as a verb. My first question has to do with the substantive of the world, with the “substance” of the world and the problem of such substantive and substantial meaning of “world.”
A second question, which is connected to the first, is about the notion of “archives.” As you said, using this word we are using the language of Derrida when discussing the “fever of archives.” The word “archive” and the notions and problems it brings about sound and appear to me rather as a self-re-Europeanization. Instead of saying “arché” (origin), we now say “archive.” I think it is quite problematic to speak about archives as a kind of salvation or solution that would enable us to escape from the logic of origins, when “archive” is a more contemporary word for the same gesture—the search for reasons, principles, origins, “archs” of foundation. Even if archives are said in plural, the “fever” of archives bears testimony of how the same logic—Western, European logic of the “archai” is being appropriated everywhere by everyone. We see in the plural theoretical landscapes of today how the ontological vocabulary is being rephrased with different prefixes. If during new-Platonism, the ontological vocabulary was rephrased by means of adding the prefix “epi,” “trans,” or “hyper” to Greek ontology, now we witness how it is being rephrased with the prefix “with,” “dia,” or “alter” and, considering the interesting lecture held yesterday by Peter Szendy, the prefix “cin” from “cinema” but also from cinis, the Latin word for ashes, and so on. Is “archive” not doing the same, rephrasing the same ontological vocabulary and pronouncing once again the European longing for renewal, rebirth, and its mirage of another and other worlds, of the world of others, endorsing the old logic of a new world?
AM: I am using a language from here, for the sake of making possible an exchange. It is a practical question. Of course I could use a language that nobody would understand. But of course your question touches on problems that are far more complicated than that, above all the question concerning the one, the each one, and of the archive. I could use the figure of a wheat loft. In Saharan Africa and in some parts of central and austral Africa, this place is treated as a sacred place in a very mystical sense because it is a material place with the function to preserve what we could call, in a more general way, the reserves of life. This figure could be the equivalent of the term “archive” arising from the Greek.
I understand archive as a wheat loft and, as such, as an effective material place. It is the presence of that without which life would be interrupted. The risk of death is introduced here in the sense of a community; that is how I conceive an archive. The wheat loft has a decisive material trace. It is not like ashes that were discussed yesterday. It is something completely practical. I think we can recharge the concept of archive, bringing to it a supplement, sorry for using this word, and reanimate it departing from experiences of life that do not have their place in a place of origin. Of course this implies a whole work of translation of the loss of meaning that happens on the way and of the traffic and movements of meanings. You understand this quite well, insofar as you have translated one of the most accomplished philosophers of the twentieth century.4 Using this term, “archive,” I am also addressing the question of Europeanization.
Your second question is about the world as substantive. No, the world I am referring to is not substantive. The world is not thought of in the sense of a predicate as it has been in Western metaphysics, anchored in a thought of being, in ontology. In the question of being, which is one of the central questions of monotheism, being is necessarily one, and moreover a substantial one. It is from the substantial one, from the substance that the category of relation is thought. But in the world I am talking about, the one, the substance is thought from out of the relation. In this way of thinking, relation and the compositions of the world are the main question. The world is composed inside circulation; it is a question about the composition of the world and not the end of the world. I am not trying to say that Heidegger or other philosophers are wrong, but I am trying to complicate a little more what is complicated and to insist that the use of one sole tradition impoverishes and hinders us to respond theoretically to the challenges of today.
MC: I totally agree with you. But I would like to share now a preoccupation that concerns the very question of sharing. I totally agree that world must be thought departing from relations, indeed, at the basis of the in-relation, so to speak. The relata, the positions and differences, define themselves from out of the movements of in-relations, from the being-in-relation. My preoccupation is the following. There is a global order, despite the acknowledgment of the diversity of this globalism and its “archives”; there is a movement of uni-dimensionalization, to use the language of Marcuse, of all different archives. This movement of uni-dimensionalization belongs to the axis of capitalism. It could be summed up in the following manner: In this order, the global capitalist order, everything has to leave behind what it has been for the sake of becoming whatsoever that can then be used, misused, abused by whomever, whenever, wherever. This means that the contemporary concept of capitalism is not only characterized by a laissez faire laissez passer, a let do let pass, but by a leaving behind of every ontological determination insofar as everything has to become nothing for the sake of relation, communication, and circulation. My preoccupation is that there is both a necessity and a danger to speak the language of relations. This language is also the language of capitalism, and it is not an accident that scholars teaching at advanced schools of economy in the world find in both Foucault and Deleuze theoretical foundations for their new theories of global capitalism based on becoming an agency rather than on “being” or ontological determinations. The language of relation is the language of economy. I see here a great danger, which is the one of our discourses contributing to the ambiguity of ideas, concepts, and thoughts in times where ambiguity appears to be a very powerful weapon of control and oppression.
The other question referred to “sharing” is whether we don’t need to think of sharing as the experience of sharing what cannot be shared. I am speaking here the language of Jean-Luc Nancy. I think this is the political and existential meaning of love. Speaking of love as the experience of sharing what cannot be shared, of appropriating what cannot be appropriated, we approach a limit to capitalist appropriation. This sounds naive and simplistic, but the main point here is to become aware that there is a tendency in our own theoretical discourses to reappropriate the henological language of the one into the regional and provincial, trying to universalize the local.
AM: This is a shared preoccupation! It is an intricate question. We see everywhere efforts to change whatsoever exists. Moreover, all languages seem to become easily a trap, continuously betraying itself. But the risk of language is perhaps the only source of creation. However, saying the risk we risk in order to abandon the risk and get trapped by the promise of an unambiguous meaning. It seems that we are speaking about the power of the capital. In this expression we can put whatsoever meaning we want. The actual power of the capital derives from the fact that it could and can be easily assimilated to any animist religion. If we recall a fragment by Walter Benjamin, Capitalism as Religion, we can find in this text some hints to these questions. Benjamin considers religion as permanent ritual, but still we should ask which kind of a religion he is thinking about. I would say it is an animist religion. Animist religion is of course a contradiction in terms, thus it is not a religion. It is a “religion” liberated from taboos, from the interdictions that are necessary for the formation of a culture. These taboos emerge from tensions—for instance, the one between nature and culture, the sacred and the profane, the human and the object—showing a limit between these realms and instances that shall not be transgressed for the sake of respecting the sacrality of life itself. Liberated from these interdictions, the human being can be treated as an object. The most incisive experience of the fraction of this principle—the one that interdictions are needed for the sake of not transgressing the distinction between nature and culture, between humans and objects—was the Atlantic slavery through which, because of race, a number of human individuals could be exchanged, sold, bought, and so on. But even when reduced to the condition of objects, they are objects of a certain kind; insofar as they speak, create religions, they are objects that disturb. A person is not an object, and this is the fundamental principle upon which the emancipatory condition of modern times also relies upon. This is also the main thought in Marx when describing the problem of alienation. Today we witness the movement of realizing a general equivalence where none of these interdictions, distinctions, tensions, are sustained. This equalization of differences at the basis of general equivalence has, in my view, terrible consequences for the economy of language itself. Thus it is necessary to know where and from where one should speak for the sake of pronouncing the indignation toward this kind of generalized fluidity. This generalized fluidity reaches the economy of language and its capacity of symbolization. This does not mean that we are no longer capable of symbolization but that the conditions for symbolizations have changed with technology.
But I haven’t spoken about sharing and love.
MC: We want also to share these thoughts with the audience.
AM: A short reflection on sharing. You said that love experiences the sharing of what cannot be shared.
MC: Speaking the language of Jean-Luc Nancy, letting his absent presence speak with us.
AM: Yesterday I was discussing Fanon, one of the greatest thinkers of alienation, with some colleagues and students. Fanon’s seminal book Peau noire, masques blancs5 begins with some reflections on love. One of the conditions of love is also said to be a minimum of sharing of whatsoever. For Fanon, the principal dimension of love is the sharing of a face, to use a word by Levinas. I open the eyes, I see a face, and my reaction is the one of wanting and longing to continue to see, to caress the face. In this face I not only recognize the traits of my own face, but I also experience the traits I would like to be my own face. For Fanon, if one is not capable of sharing the face on this level, then everything is forgotten—love, the common—and there is nothing that can be done together.
MC: Colonization is indeed the violence of this oblivion, of the impossibility of sharing the face on this level. If colonization is a scar on the face and in the sharing, how to share this scar and scarring of the face? I once heard a European desiring to have a colonial scar too.
AM: The scar has to be democratized. I don’t wish the colonial scar to anybody.
MC: Shouldn’t we say that this desire already is the scar?
AM: In South Africa, students are fed up. They think that twenty years after Apartheid, nothing has been done, that Mandela was an old man filtered, so to speak, by the whites, and that the fight must begin anew. But how to begin it anew? This position is what has been called retrospective politics, a kind of politics that looks backward, instead of an anticipatory politics, a politics of the future. They are all now engaged with retrospective politics. They evoke the big prophets of the diaspora-critical African tradition. All students read Fanon. They read Fanon but understand Sartre. If you ask to which extreme they want to go, they will answer: We want to go until the point that 13 percent of the Earth is for the whites and the rest for them: a radical agricultural reform. A return to the 1930s, when the white minority privatized the mines. Some would claim the need to go back to 350 years ago and begin anew from the beginning. The thing is that we don’t think what we have lost can be recovered by us by legal means. We know that in several circumstances the law does not generate justice. Law and justice are not a simple equation. Very often justice demands the suppression of the law, and this suppression is many times not negotiable, unconditional, and this is why it can take the form of violence. Thereby, a claim for the right to violence is made, a right forbidden by the constitutions. Constitutions suspend revolution, and democracy is a moment of suspension of revolution. The claim for the right of violence is very serious, because violence can be used without limits and against revolution itself.
We should go back to the question of the end of the world, shouldn’t we? What I would like to say is that the question today is not so much about the end of the world but about the edification of a possible that would not be the repetition of the past. Because of what we have been, we know what has become and where it has taken us to. That we shall not allow. We can also no longer change the beginning. We need to create other sources. Can Western metaphysics provide us with resources for this creation of another possible? Maybe it can. But at the same, it has so many limits, above all the one of believing that creation can be born from destruction. This implies also that destruction should not be feared, that it should be embraced. What has such a thought generated? It has conducted us to the actual situation of human beings who are in war against everything. It is a war against the biosphere, against other humans, against themselves. Today human beings see enemies everywhere, and the enemies have moreover become a metaphysical figure used to justify the politics of security of war that is experienced today everywhere and on different levels. The logic that sees creation coming from destruction destroys, however, the view that creation remains strange to the remains of the past. How to interrupt this logic of continuity as the basis of the idea that creation follows destruction? This, I think, is a question we need more than ever to face. With what should it be replaced? I think that neither Heidegger nor Nietzsche was capable of giving us an answer.
MC: Let us then listen now to the audience.
Notes
1. Jean-Luc Nancy and Federico Ferrari, La Fin des Fins (Paris: Vrin, 2015).
2. Jean-Luc Nancy, After Fukushima: The Equivalence of Catastrophes (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015).
3. See the Mayan narrative of the colonization in Chilam Balam of Chumayel’s book, which says: “Então tudo era bom / e então (os deuses) foram abatidos. / Havia neles sabedoria. / Não havia então pecado . . . / Não havia então enfermidade, / não havia dor de ossos / Não havia febre para eles / não havia variolas. / Retamente erguido ia seu corpo então / Não foi assim que fizeram os dzules / quando chegaram aqui / Eles nos ensinaram o medo / vieram fazer as flores murchar, / Para que sua flor viesse / danificaram e engoliram nossa flor / [. . .] Castrar o sol! Isso vieram fazer aqui os dzules / [. . .]” in: León-Portillo: A Conquista da América Latina vista pelos Índios. Relatos astecas, maias e incas (Petrópolis, Brazil: Vozes, 1982), pp. 59–60.
4. Marcia Sá Cavalcante Schuback is the translator of Being and Time into Portuguese.
5. Frantz Fanon, Peau noire, masques blancs (Paris: Seuil, 1952).