Abstract
“Latin America”, for the ecopolitical approach, could be appropriate as the proper name of the ecological disaster, even as its first person: the environmental catastrophe, by means of “Latin America”, would say “I”. Genealogically, and as part of the so-called “Third World”, it would delimit the frontiers where the disastrous takes place “naturally”. But “Latin America”, from the philosophical perspective, has also been the locus par excellence to think about the vegetal and the indigenous. This article, driven by the current relevance of these two concepts, rereads the work of Rodolfo Kusch, one of the key figures of the so-called Pensamiento latinoamericano, and unveils not only one of the most original reflections on “plant metaphysics” and the “indigenous thought” but also the contours of a new or alternative philosophical subject: a thinking “we”. Drawing on Kusch’s indications, this text traces “an-other us” on the discursive level and develops the fundamental Kuschean intuition according to which such “we” has a synesthetic nature. From there, this article points to the conceptual reconfigurations of the vegetal and the indigenous by M. Marder and E. Viveiros de Castro to indicate in them the need to experiment, before and in the face of disaster, an-other “us” by/in thinking.
Highlights
Abstract: “Latin America”, for the ecopolitical approach, could be appropriate as the proper name of the ecological disaster, even as its first person: the environmental catastrophe, by means of “Latin
This article points to the conceptual reconfigurations of the vegetal and the indigenous by M
The Argentine philosopher and anthropologist Rodolfo Kusch is in many ways not just any example within Latin American Thought and its intuitions about the potential of the vegetal, and especially of the “indigenous”, to scrutinize and define what philosophical thought must think inasmuch as it is the thought of Latin America
Summary
The Argentine philosopher and anthropologist Rodolfo Kusch is in many ways not just any example within Latin American Thought and its intuitions about the potential of the vegetal, and especially of the “indigenous”, to scrutinize and define what philosophical thought must think inasmuch as it is the thought of Latin America. “We are in Cuzco”, as Kusch tells us, is anything but a way of saying or some literary device; it is my way of organizing the reading of Kusch’s profuse and heteroclite work around which I have defined its central problem, namely the existence, the “be-ing” (“estar siendo”), more precisely, of “our living” (“nuestro vivir”) as an object of a Latin American thinking to which only an “us” can respond and that only “we” can smell, articulate, and feel. Since El pensamiento indígena y popular en América (Indigenous and Popular Thinking in America), 1970, until his last book, Esbozo de una antropología filosófica americana (1978) (Sketch of an American Philosophical Anthropology), passing, through his Geocultura del hombre americano (Geoculture of the American Man), Kusch advances in the systematization of what in América profunda was still perceptible as “topic” and of what progressively becomes data or category It is not one example among others, this Sketch begins by defining in advance its main subject: the “People”. As in Kusch’s proposal, such a sense must include the vegetal and the indigenous—privileged figures of otherness and today preeminent in environmental reflections and concerns—and derive from them the cardinal philosophical horizon of that time and very likely of “our” today, all this must be sought in another sense, in the alteration of the meaning and the sensorium; to put it in a single word, synesthetically: altering the senses of the philosophical so that thinking stops seeing and saying (collecting, legein) and instead smell an-other us
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