Kaieteur: place of the pharmakos and deconstruction

Abstract

The Fall of Kaieteur, iconic for Guyana, takes its name from an indigenous legend, assimilated by the influential poet, A.J. Seymour, to the Christian version of the pharmakos, the sacrificial victim. Harris exposes the structural ambivalence of the motif and its basis in Seymour’s suppression of an interiority ultimately derived from physical space. He submits the indigenous cult of kanaima to a similar spatialization of the collective unconscious in a landscape corresponding to the findings of recent anthropology. In The Age of the Rainmakers Kaieteur is the location for the reactive formations of political conflict and the writing resorts to “infinite rehearsal” in language to escape entrapment in the same ambivalences. This brings Harris close to the practice of différance and the deconstructive position on language and politics in Tel Quel, where Derrida first published “La pharmacie de Platon”, but whereas Derrida bases deconstruction purely on language, Harris bases his approach to language on physical space.