Volume 17

Negativity from Subaltern Studies to the Anthropocene

28 October 202523 November 2025By Raul Carrillo

Gareth Williams
University of Michigan

Volume 17, 2025

For academic men to be happy, the universe would have to take shape. All of philosophy has no other goal; it is a matter of giving a frock coat to what is . . . On the other hand, affirming that the universe resembles nothing and is only formless amounts to saying that the universe is something like a spider or spit.

Georges Bataille, “Formless,” Visions of Excess

Where are we? What is our position in this epoch of our history, what are the possibilities that it grants us, and how does it determine us?

Jean Vioulac, Apocalypse of Truth

In the wake of the dissolution of the Latin American Subaltern Studies Group between 1998 and 1999, two noteworthy essays were published in 2000 by former members of the short-lived collective that, given current conditions and the historical shifts that have occurred since their publication twenty-five years ago, are worthy of further deliberation. The two essays under consideration in the following pages are John Kraniauskas’ “Hybridity in a Transnational Frame: Latin-Americanist and Post-colonial Perspectives on Cultural Studies” and Alberto Moreiras’ “Ten Notes on Primitive Imperial Accumulation: Ginés de Sepúlveda, Las Casas, Fernández de Oviedo”. My question is: how do these works when taken together stand in relation to our present, and what are the possibilities they grant us now? For the initial relation between the two essays to attain a standpoint or an equal footing of sorts, I should first characterize what is fundamental in their mutual co-determinations and distances. For this reason, I should indicate from the outset that the basic determination of these two works is the question of negativity, and, more specifically, it is negativity in the overall context of the historical shift from disciplinary national societies to fully globalized societies of control in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet bloc at the end of the twentieth century.1 In other words, their essential thematization is negativity in relation to a shifting sense and experience of historicity, but also in relation to the possibility of an alternative understanding of historicity at a moment of enormous upheavals in the spatial and technological arrangements of domination.

Both essays examine this historical shift’s precise relation to the historicity of a so-called primitive accumulation, which is the a priori double bind for thinking freedom, or for thinking freely, in, and in relation to, Latin America and the history of capital. The historicity of on-going primitive accumulation situates all modern and contemporary thinking in relation to Latin America as determined by the obscure coexistence of disparate temporalities and zones of experience that are mutually exclusive yet fully conjoined orders of existence (the spectrality of the imperfectly concealed ground of the pre-colonial in conjunction with the transcultural grounds of the colonial and postcolonial). These zones of experience and existence are, however, mere folds in the single epoch of Christian onto-theological humanism, or Western metaphysics. In both essays, then, the historicity of on-going primitive accumulation determines the origin of both colonial and postcolonial hegemony, in its relation to the inscriptions of expropriation that characterize post-Independence Latin American cultural production and thinking. I am drawn to these two essays from a quarter century ago because it can now be said that in different ways, they bring forth an epochal situation defined by slightly distinct understandings of finitude and negativity, which Latin American subaltern studies and the decolonial paradigm—in fact, the theoretical humanities in general— have never actually addressed. I am also drawn to them to the extent that our current sense of epochality shifts the terms of debate entirely from what they were at the turn of the 21st century.

As already indicated, both essays address the sociological problem of community determined entirely by the history of on-going primitive accumulation. However, they also address the historicity of the metaphysics of subjectivity and politics in modern Latin America. They are indicative of what was still deemed possible at the turn of the millennium in reference to the theoretical inflections of culture and politics. For this reason, they also remind us of what the academic field of Latin American studies failed, or only partially succeeded, to take up in the wake of subaltern studies in reference to the question of the multi-temporalities of capital and the problems they pose for decolonial thinking. They are also evocative of an incommensurable distance between the state of capital at the time of writing (not even a decade after the collapse of the Soviet Union and only twelve months before 9/11), and the terms of debate and the conditions of existence now. 

The So-Called Primitive Accumulation as Originary Terror, and the A Priori Structure of Decolonial Nihilism

It is well known that Marx indicated in his assumption of a ‘so-called’ primitive accumulation that the violence of expropriation “plays approximately the same role in political economy as original sin does in theology” (Capital, Vol. 1, 873). This original sin, capitalism’s a priori force, or the violence of the “pre-history of capital” (875) which “is not the result of the capitalist mode of production but its point of departure” (873), is the concealed ground that remains nevertheless suspended throughout the processes of capitalist realization and temporalization in partially concealed, travestied, spectralized, or de-figured forms.

In 2000 Alberto Moreiras indicated in reference to the history of Spanish imperial reason that the originary violence of primitive accumulation—Spanish imperial force—uncovers the origin without an origin of capitalism and of the territorialization of its fundamental ontology and reasoning.  The so-called primitive accumulation, as the exercise of force, is:

Outside history, it grounds history. It is an ongoing phenomenon: no capitalism without primitive accumulation. It is placed between no-separation and complete separation, and it achieves or realizes neither. Complete separation: naked life. No-separation: naked life as well. In between, the rift of primitive accumulation: history’s double. It blooms because it blooms. Ongoing expropriation . . . The imperial territorialization of the New World, in its early Spanish moment, constitutes something like a breaking into history of history’s very unthinkable. (2000, 353)

The extimate rift, or spectralizing limit, that is the breaking into history of history’s very unthinkable at the social, experiential, and epistemological levels, at both beginning and end, is the un-subsumable negativity that constitutes and haunts the entire subsequent history of empire and capital. It points in the direction of an un-prethinkable order of historical experience and awareness beyond the Western logos—an uncolonized pre-history, or formless negativity—and of that un-prethinkable’s ongoing inscription in the modern territorializations of the divorce and separation that we now refer to as colonial/modern “culture”. This extimate rift—Spanish force in conquest—marks the origin of modern historical reason and its double, both order and abyss, or form and formlessness. It is a rift that is there but that cannot be determined, localized, situated, or arrested purely from within the sociological history of the principle of sufficient reason. Nor, for that matter, can it be grasped from beyond that same principle. The assumption of the so-called primitive accumulation is not merely an originary precursor for a socio-economic, racial, linguistic or cultural problem that can be resolved or ended via the dialectical overcoming of capitalism and the consolidation of de-alienated, or de-colonized, forms of subjectivity. It constitutes a limit for thinking that demands “an epochal breakthrough that would restitute critical thinking to a non-imperial destiny” (Moreiras, 2000, 344). It demands, in other words, a refoundation for thinking and for all understandings of history, and therefore of being. Having said that, it is also the absolute limit to that demand’s realization or resolution.  It is for this reason that the so-called primitive accumulation is parergonal in the relation between history, capitalism, and the history of being that cuts across the coloniality of all subsequent forms of colonial and postcolonial power and domination. It is parergonal because, as the most distant and most intimate lacunary place and non-place, it always already disallows every law of historical reappropriation and essence. It marks the uncanny and irrepressible haunting of “an outside which is called to the inside of the inside in order to constitute it as an inside” (Derrida, 1987, 63). Dialectical truth, in this sense, is only ever, at best, partial, since it is always already haunted by that which is its most intimate excess: the violent negativity of originary expropriation that is suspended and on-going in the history of modern and contemporary capital. For this reason, the so-called primitive accumulation uncovers the limitations of decolonization itself, because it uncovers the problem of the aporetic question of a historicity that demands to be apprehended and overcome, in conjunction with its double, which is capitalism’s violent origin without an origin, haunting unceasingly from within the multiple histories of existential and economic expropriation. Extimate to the vulgar time of capitalist progress or of all developmentalism, but also of the history of historical materialism, expropriation points always in the direction of the Hegelian Aufhebung’s underlying unthinkable, or formless void.2 There is no full oblivion available in the historicity that is wrenched open and unleashed on account of capital’s a priori force.

This is the question raised by Moreiras as he points towards the murky underpinnings of every hegemony in the wake of the so-called primitive accumulation:

From the necessary but impossible thought of primitive accumulation as the ground of ground, the history of colonial conflict cannot be understood as the history of a hegemony formation; rather, the history of every process of hegemony is always already the history of a forgetting: hegemony is always the forgetting of primitive accumulation, the original sin of political economy. Primitive accumulation as the material being of beings. (2000, 353)

Hegemony is only ever imperfect in its desire for presence and oblivion, since the so-called primitive accumulation also raises the question inevitably, unavoidably, of “the original terror upon which hegemonic reason functions” (Moreiras, 2000, 343). Whereas primitive accumulation is both the originary and the on-going, the first and last privation and destitution of the being of beings, both the ‘at-hand’ and the ‘out of reach’ of colonial expropriation and destruction simultaneously, hegemony is the structural law of political capture of an imperial reason—the re-appropriation of expropriation—that seeks to subsume and to cast into oblivion the entire problematic of originary and on-going primitive accumulation. And it does this in the name of imperial and subsequently national political form. However, hegemony is only ever the social organization of the imperfect and ultimately impossible re-appropriation and dialectical subordination of the concealed ground, or imperfectly absent cause, and its processes of spectralization, as Jacques Derrida indicated over thirty years ago in Specters of Marx. The so-called primitive accumulation structures a priori the colonial and postcolonial world. It is the constitutive and simultaneously de-constituting haunting of imperial political form by formlessness, by the terror of “the psychotic night of the world without which no empire could come into the light” (Moreiras, 2000, 361). Terror is the ground imperfectly concealed by hegemony, and, as we know by now, something always escapes hegemony.3

It is precisely the terror of the psychotic night of imperial force that leads us to have to confront the nigh impossible fact that “it is only because the cogito cannot be thought without its shadowing madness, that imperial reason must posit the unthinkability of a primitive imperial accumulation as its very condition of possibility” (2000, 362). We always already, and only ever, think from within the metaphysics of capital that seeks to conceal its originary concealed ground. Imperial reason is the territorialization of the empire of reason, command, and oblivion, and it is predicated on the positing of the unthinkability—of the sheer terror—of a primitive imperial accumulation which is an underlying unthinkability that anchors hegemonic re-appropriation to state reason, in the same way that as for Thomas Hobbes it is fear of death that provides the underlying ground for the exercise of sovereign power. But, Moreiras warns, in specific reference no longer to coloniality but to the shift from discipline to control in contemporary globalized capital:

If the establishment of a difference remains possible, if a topological distance is to be found today, not for the apotropaic naturalization of the regime of rule, as in the organic thinkers of empire through the critique of empire, but rather for its denaturalization, it is perhaps first of all through the thinking of its unthinkable history in Spanish imperial reason . . . Imperial accumulation holds the key to a deconstitution of the verum—and hence also of what is false and has been set as such. This is another way of thinking the violence of empire. (2000, 362)

In other words, the other way of thinking the violence of empire involves taking seriously not the verum of imperial hegemony and the civilizational legacies of its Christian moral judgements, but the infrapolitical expropriation that is the impossible thought—the psychotic night of the world—without which no empire could come into the light (2000, 361). Formless, in other words, as the void underlying the imperfectly concealed ground, the obscure basis of a refoundation for thinking in the absence of every understanding of history as the history of hegemony formations, which merely strive to conceal infrapolitical negativity by recasting it as a naturalized metaphysics of reason, command, and domination.

Moreiras is suggesting, then, that in order to decolonize truly, decolonial thinking should not concern itself with going beyond coloniality, but should go back into what he understands as being the concealed ground of coloniality itself, which is the originary terror that both grounds and de-grounds the subsequent history of Western consciousness and experience. If it does not do this it renders coloniality itself, along with the decolonial option in thinking that accompanies it, questionless.

Having said that, what could we understand by the operations of a naturalized metaphysics of domination, which, in Moreiras’ formulation, would be synonymous with the metaphysics of decolonial thinking over the course of the last thirty years?

Allow me to suggest an example: Rosario Castellanos’ 1962 novel Oficio de tinieblas (The Book of Lamentations) offers its reader a tragic lesson in the metaphysical underpinnings and academic limitations of decolonial desire and praxis. In the novel the barren Tzotzil speaking Catalina Díaz Puiljá—who is described as “one of those who dare to gaze on the face of mystery, an ilol, a seer, whose lap is a nest of spells” (5)—becomes the catalyst of an indigenous rebellion that sweeps through the caves and hills surrounding San Juan Chamula, just a few kilometers from Ciudad Real (now commonly referred to as San Cristóbal de Las Casas) in the southern Mexican state of Chiapas. The rebellion, which is evocative of the land reforms of the 1930s but also of the caste wars that typified the nineteenth century, takes years to come to fruition. Its original conditions emerge when Catalina confiscates and raises the male offspring of a young indigenous woman raped by a wealthy caxlán (or ladino). She names the child Domingo, and slowly sets in motion the wheels of a messianic movement designed to rid ‘the People of the Bat’ of an entire order of colonial domination (a world of “confused stammerings, lowered eye-lids, arms falling in gestures of fear” [1]), a world that for centuries has been predicated on the expropriation of the land, the innate privilege of speaking Castilian Spanish (“an arrogant language, a language that wrenches the hearts of those who hear it . . . like an iron instrument of mastery, a weapon of conquest, the striking lash of the law’s whip” [1]), and the domination of ladino rites and understandings of Catholic law and salvation.

Throughout the novel Catalina remains surreptitiously hellbent on destroying the entire colonial/modern order of San Juan Chamula and its environs by providing its valleys with a specifically Tzotzil messiah born from the bloody sacrifice of her non-biological mestizo son, Domingo, known as “the one born at the eclipse”. Catalina wants to resignify originary expropriation by guaranteeing a non-imperial, fully decolonized, destiny for the future. But she errs entirely since her desire for decolonization is nothing more than a critique of imperial reason driven by an unerring embrace of the possibility of a moral God to offset the entire historicity of colonial prejudice and injustice. For Díaz Puiljá decolonization is akin to a will to morality in which “the man oppressed would realize that he stands on the same ground as the oppressors and that he has no privilege, no higher rank than them” (Nietzsche, 119):

It was Domingo’s turn . . . The period of atonement has now ended. The signs of proof have been fulfilled. The dark powers are reconciled with their slaves and have given them the gift that will make them equal in strength and power to the Caxláns. When the blood of an innocent is spilled, those who drink it will rise up with new might. Christ was what the Ladino had over them. Now they would have Christ . . . The first rush of blood (from the side, as in all crucifixions) blinds Catalina . . . Domingo loses consciousness . . . From the moment of his birth he has been marked by the cipher of the only law that governs the world: the law of force . . . Catalina . . . finds the right words . . . “We have all reached the end of the story with the Ladino . . . Now we, too, have a Christ . . . His birth, his suffering and his death have placed the Tzotzil, the Chamula, the Indian on the same level as the Ladino. Let us defy him . . . We are equal now that our Christ offsets his Christ. (310-23)

Our Christ offsets his Christ: our Christ offsets coloniality with decoloniality, which is more Christian metaphysics. The Chamula rebellion ends in a catastrophic bloodbath because the Tzotzil messiah, while offering the symbolic promise of equality, freedom, and redemption, is the obscure image and displaced reproduction of caxlán domination itself since in the rebellion there is no actual dismantling of Christian onto-theology. There is therein no creative positing of an alternative understanding of historicity, merely a moral transfer of force from colonizer to colonized since the entire rebellion is driven by an unquestioned faith in the categories of reason (the relation between sacrifice and eternal redemption, for example) that underlie the Christian path to transcendence. For this reason, the uprising is itself testimony to the fully naturalized metaphysics of Spanish imperial reason, law, truth, command, salvation, and domination, and there is simply no decolonization, or decolonial historicity, available for the Tzotzil speakers of Oficio de tinieblas. 

This is the tragic double bind of Tzotzil cultural syncretism, or transculturation, to the extent that their desire for decolonization—for a new commencement, or refoundation—is a mere critique of the imperial reason that enslaves them. The tragedy that Castellanos highlights, in other words, is encountered in the fact that the entire history of European phallo-logocentrism (that is, the legacies of the paternal, the familial, the fraternal, the Law, the Christian community, the hearth, the nation, the homo-philial etc.) remains firmly in place at the heart of the Tzotzil community, despite all accusations of Eurocentrist domination. In this sense, in the Chamula rebellion there can be no epochal breakthrough capable of restituting experience or critical thinking to the non-imperial, which would mean the non-metaphysical. There can only be nihilism, that is, the affirmation of a collective life overrun by the Christian moral hypothesis of man endowed with absolute value and therefore also with the potential for absolute valuelessness (Nietzsche, 116).

Catalina Díaz Puiljá, however, would no doubt agree with Anibal Quijano’s humanist, decolonial affirmation from 2008 that “it is time to learn to free ourselves from the Eurocentric mirror where our image is always, necessarily, distorted. It is time, finally, to cease being what we are not” (222). In this crystallization of the entire ontological project of Latin American decoloniality—that is, the desire to cease being what ‘we’ are not—Quijano’s recourse to a ‘People’ yet to be delivered up from historical alienation unto their true and independent metaphysical structure expresses the very basis of Catalina Díaz Puiljá’s tragic flaw, to the extent that it echoes and reproduces the oblivion of the expropriation/reappropriation relation that also anchors José Martí’s famous Nuestroamericanismo, Andrés Bello’s “Autonomía cultural de América”, and the Simón Bolívar of 1819.4

Anibal Quijano’s decolonial thinking, like Catalina Díaz Puiljá’s Tzotzil messianism, draws on and extends a centuries old tradition of Latin American anti-imperial thinking that is grounded in a humanist metaphysics of lo nuestro that inhabits both sides of the colonizer/colonized divide, but that can only be measured from within the imperial nomos of Catholic criollismo, and that therefore always remains subject to it.5 As in Díaz Puiljá’s rebellion in Castellanos’ novel, there is herein no creative positing: only the tragic double bind of originary expropriation, and of transculturation as the colonial/postcolonial oblivion of formless; the oblivion, that is, of the structural a priori that is the violence of the so-called primitive accumulation and its historical metaphysics.

In “Ousia and Gramme: Note on a Note from Being and Time”, Jacques Derrida had observed in 1968 that “in order to exceed metaphysics it is necessary that a trace be inscribed within the text of metaphysics—signaling not in the direction of another presence, or another form of presence, but in the direction of an entirely other text” (1984, 65). With this in mind, it is perhaps only now that we can indicate that this trace of an entirely other text—that is, the quest for a necessary glimpse of a refoundation or recommencement for thinking—was what was at stake more than twenty-five years ago when the project of Latin American subaltern studies split into two separate tendencies: on one hand, the tendency that privileged identitarian form as the presence of decoloniality taken in conjunction with the active oblivion of the negativity that underlies primitive accumulation. This came to be extended as a first avatar of decolonial thinking conceived as an extension of the hegemony of the imperial critique of empire, which is the underlying tragedy of on-going metaphysical command in the figure of Catalina Díaz Puiljá in Oficio de tinieblas. Herein there is no creative positing, only the continuation of the metaphysical, onto-theological understanding of historicity. The second tendency moved, and still moves, in the an-archic direction of a thinking that sought to be preparatory for an epochal breakthrough capable of restituting critical thinking to a non-imperial destiny. The former has made the academics of Latin American Area Studies happy. The latter has been met with a mixture of perplexity and disdain, as if it were a form of academic death worthy of being ignored like spit or of being squashed like a spider: formless. At the end of the day, however, the question of a text not fully determined by the metaphysics of hegemony, and therefore of a posthegemonic thinking extended with such an obscure lucidity in mind, remains.

Capitalist Multi-Temporality, or the Ontological Heterogeneity of Culture in Modern Latin America

It is at this point that we turn to John Kraniauskas’ “Hybridity in a Transnational Frame: Latin-Americanist and Post-colonial Perspectives on Cultural Studies” (2000). In this essay Kraniauskas approaches not the colonial force of the so-called primitive accumulation and its subsequent hegemonic reconversion into the metaphysical critique of imperial metaphysics (the breaking into history of history’s very unthinkable, and that unthinkable’s subsequent capture and rationalization as the ground of the colonial moral order). Rather, Kraniauskas considers the modern (postcolonial) historicity of on-going primitive accumulation in a Latin American modernity that remains the placeholder of what Dipesh Chakrabarty referred to as a “Derridean trace of something that cannot be enclosed” (111). In his formulations, Kraniauskas upholds Chakrabarty’s affirmation, offered via the Marxian understanding of ‘real labor’ as other than generic or abstract labor, that in modern-contemporary capital and its cultural inscriptions “other temporalities, other forms of worlding, co-exist and are possible” (112).

In this modern metaphysics which is divided along the fractures of difference, but of a difference that can be contemplated only from within the understanding of historicity as the time of developmental succession or chronology, subalternity is the name of a mark of a negativity that is, on one hand, determined by capital and that, on the other, has the potential to undermine it from within by refusing its pre-assigned place in the uneven processes of Latin American post-Independence modernization. For this reason, the author notes, difference and otherness—or other forms of worlding—are only ever assigned the category of precapitalist form from within capital itself (111). They are only ever subjects of negativity to the extent that negativity upholds the constitutive outside of modern capitalist development. In other words, for Kraniauskas the modern Latin American intellectual tradition (as seen across the works of José María Arguedas, Juan Rulfo, Gabriel García Márquez and Ángel Rama) offers a reckoning with the possibility of recalcitrantly subaltern, non-hegemonic forms of historical memory and understandings of historicity that are sedimented as the outsides of the time of capital, within capital, encoded as the promise of a historicity that challenges the “civilizing ideologemes of development” (112-13). For this reason, Kraniauskas tells us, “Disjunctive enunciation, therefore, does have a content—the differential object of narrative ordering and self-constitution—and it works as the discourse of culture’s (in this case, modernity’s) unconscious. In other words, the process of disavowal is welded into disjuncture” (119). This welding of colonial disavowal into modernization is the precise place where colonial/modern hegemony begins and potentially fails, depending on the political, cultural, and social dialectic—the relations of force—in any given place and time.

For this reason, Kraniauskas’ understanding of negativity is of a slightly different valence from that of Moreiras’, since original terror in the latter’s formulation is the infrapolitical undercommons of each and every hegemony, of each and every subsequent political representation.6 It is inconceivable from within the modern political order, and is more negative—more abyssal—than Kraniauskas’ approach to modern historicity, in which the “Derridean trace of something that cannot be enclosed” is a potential negation of negation grounded in, and yet marking a difference with, the positivity of the metaphysics of capitalist development. Infrapolitical terror lies always in excess of the dialectical negation of negation, and of the dialectic of modern consciousness. Kraniauskas, on the other hand, highlights the difference that subalternity occupies within the determined and mediated dialectics of the modern and its forms of political consciousness. This is important precisely because, willingly or unwillingly, consciously or unconsciously, the Latin American subaltern studies project of the 1990s upheld both forms and understandings of negativity—Hegelian-Marxian negativity and Heideggerian-Derridean negativity simultaneously—without ever bringing them truly into confrontation, or into an actual thinking relation. In hindsight perhaps that non-decision was both the strength and weakness of the project at that time. Now, however, our times, and indeed the world, have changed and the terms of the debate need to be clarified, if, indeed, there is to be any debate at all.

At a time when many Latinamericanists were suspicious of what they considered to be “Anglo” approaches to postcoloniality that “excluded” Latin America from its debates (a feeling that would apparently be assuaged by the identitarian advent of “decolonial studies” in the wake of subaltern studies), what Kraniauskas does in this essay is bring the two fields into active dialogue.7 As such, in his consideration of Homi Bhabha’s approach to the colonial structures that underlie contemporary neo-racism, Kraniauskas observes via Walter Benjamin that postcoloniality is the thinking of a temporal break in representation that conjures “the sign of temporal hybridity that, in Walter Benjamin’s words, ‘blasts open the continuum of history’ (in the forms of historicism and progress) bringing it to a standstill” (121). For this reason, in Kraniauskas the postcoloniality of both Anglo and Latin American traditions “is a form of countermodernity, a disavowed coloniality made present, in the present, through the gap (or ‘fracture’) in the enunciation of modern culture” (121). It brings the modern timeline of capital to a standstill. In this respect, the author continues, although responding to social conflict temporal disjuncture “is an asocial agency. From Chakrabarty’s point of view, which is influenced by Bhabha’s, it is a temporality that may remind us of ‘forms of worlding’, but which does not itself ‘world’” (122). The historicity of modern capital from a postcolonial perspective therefore raises the question of symptomatic disjuncture, retrograde echoes, and their welding into or against the developmentalist timeline of capital. It raises the question of the limitations of modern consciousness, and therefore of modern self-consciousness in relation to the politics of emancipation, the history of Spirit, and the political promise of an outside to the infrastructures of development. But it is important that these recollections of alternative forms of worlding do not themselves ‘world’, since this indicates the dialectical imperfection of the teleology of progress. Asocial agency is the recalcitrant, non-dialectical outside that signals, but that does not guarantee, the zone of a new foundation for thinking and acting. For this reason, formless (the concealed an-arche, or void, that underlies the metaphysics of every colonial/modern hegemony) remains untouched, as does the question of a recommencement for thinking.

In other words, the problem of the extimate rift, or spectralizing limit that is the breaking into history of history’s very unthinkable (the force of the so-called primitive accumulation) or the un-subsumable terror that haunts the entire history of empire, capital, and indeed the principle of sufficient reason (and which is the originary colonial ground for capitalist multi-temporality in the first place), is never entirely internalized as a dialectical relation between form and content in the relation between past and present. This—the subtle line between originary negativity and on-going postcolonial negativity—is the subtle distinction that underlies these two essays that come out of the collapse of the subaltern studies project, and that strive to move in the direction of alternative understandings of historicity.

Kraniauskas mobilizes his reading of postcoloniality across Anglo and Latin American traditions primarily to approach the question of cultural hybridity in the work of Néstor García Canclini, which twenty-five years ago was deemed by many to be transformative. Kraniauskas, however, has other ideas for, as he indicates, Canclini’s overriding culturalism obliterates the question of political economy, and therefore of capital as a determining, temporalizing instance of, and by, cultural form (130). For Kraniauskas García Canclini provides in his understanding of cultural hybridity “not a critique of the logics of development but rather an example of cultural development in which . . . the chronological time of capital not only remains intact but may even be strengthened” (130). In other words, Canclini’s understanding of cultural form (that is, hybridity) helps to territorialize and naturalize the political economy and historicity of modern and contemporary domination itself.

In contrast, Kraniauskas counters Canclini’s naturalization of domination with an image of the Mexico-U.S. border that, “as a space of hybrid cultural intercrossings, a neoterritoriality, becomes paradigmatic” (131). Canclini accepts that the Mexico-U.S. border is a place of suffering. However, Kraniauskas notes, the question of suffering “is passed over too quickly, and curiously this is because the processes of deterritorialization and reterritorialization described by García Canclini become binarized and—most importantly here—temporalized” (131). In other words, suffering is registered and at the same time cast into oblivion by Canclini to the extent that processes of deterritorialization and reterritorialization become integrated into the internal common-sense articulations of cultural development itself.

In contrast, Kraniauskas echoes border suffering not so much in terms akin to Moreiras’ reference to “the psychotic night of the world” (361), that is, as the negativity of an on-going originary terror—or coloniality—but as a gesture toward a recalcitrant outside to the epoch of transition from discipline to control:

The suffering García Canclini mentions so briefly may be more that just symptomatic of the loss of traditional identities—that is, nostalgia. It may have critical content too, registering at the border resistance and even possible alternatives to the new territorialized border subjectivities being produced and replicated throughout the cities of the United States, and elsewhere, as ‘disciplinary societies’ are transformed into ‘societies of control’. (132)

At the end of both essays, then, Moreiras and Kraniauskas open the historical passage from discipline to control to slightly distinct but intimately conjoined understandings of negativity, one originary and that therefore proposes going back into the concealed ground of the modern dialectic of consciousness; the other constitutive of the modern time of capital and the contemporary historicity of on-going primitive accumulation. Negativity in two disparate yet intimately conjoined moments in the history of the capitalist order of domination. The first is already infrapolitical, while the second constitutes the transformative potential that remains internal to the dialectical ground of a political countermodernity dependent for its entanglements on the positivity of full-fledged capital. One invites us to think from a place other than that of imperial and national political form and dialectics, that is, in light of the unthinkability of the terror that inhabits the psychotic night of both hegemony-thinking and of naked control and domination. The other invites us to think from within imperial and national political form and its structural limitations. One proposes a thinking capable of articulating an epochal breakthrough that would clear away the metaphysics of subjectivity and identity—the coloniality of all reason—, via a non-imperial thought no longer enthralled to the metaphysics of coloniality, discipline, or control, all of which are variants in the historicity of past and present biopolitics. The other seeks political transformation in relation to what the metaphysics of the biopolitical cannot subsume.

The possibilities and differences extended by Moreiras and Kraniauskas have never been taken up seriously by the field of Latin American decolonial thinking, nor, indeed, by any of its humanist variants or academic next of kin. As a result, in the last two decades there has been no creative positing of an alternative understanding of historicity available to us from within the university discourse of contemporary Latin American cultural and literary studies. We have been left simply with more and more inattentive, and therefore negligent, forms of modern humanism that have remained enthralled to, for example, changes in the practice of literary form or by the autonomy of art in the Latin American avantgardes of the early twentieth century. There are no longer any debates in the field, which has succumbed entirely to the broader hyper-individualizations of late-neoliberal commodity fetishism and its ideologies of subjecthood.

Climate Collapse and the Question of Negativity Twenty-Five Years Later

And now both the times and the world have changed, and we confront a new arrangement of mastery. In the same year that Kraniauskas and Moreiras published their essays addressing the shifting patterns of expropriation and negativity in the passage from modern discipline to control, in which both authors committed to alternative understandings of historicity on the basis of slightly differential understandings and uses of negativity, the Dutch meteorologist and atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen coined the term Anthropocene. Since 2000 the climate collapse that the term Anthropocene denotes, and that has also been referred to as Capitalocene and Entropocene, has become the contemporary expression of the history of on-going primitive accumulation that, together with finance, cognitive, and criminal capitalism such as narco-accumulation, expresses the tragic character of contemporary global domination, exploitation, and societal destruction.8

It is now the case that we face a renewed confrontation with expropriation and negativity, but in which we take leave of the epoch of modern humanist consciousness—of the epoch of the gathering of subjectivity, will, and their sociopolitical forms around the ‘I think’ of the Enlightenment and its historicity—and indeed confront a fundamental shift in the ontological regime of truth. The emerging collapse of human and natural history that is now referred to as the Anthropocene opens an abyss at the heart of humanism’s relation to the history of emancipation. It is no longer the situation faced by the former members of the Latin American subaltern studies group in the late 1990s—myself included—nor by the decolonial paradigm that became dominant in its wake. What is brought into question now in the context of the unevenness and un-foreseeability of planetary climate collapse is the entire teleology of modern consciousness and political emancipation, in conjunction with the domination of the machinic and of a fundamental transformation in the rule of reason.

In the mid-1940s Martin Heidegger penned “The Essence of Nihilism”, in which he observed that “if we grant . . . that being itself is saved in its staying-away, then the history of the omission of the staying-away is precisely the preservation of this self-saving of being itself . . . The history of the omission of the staying-away of being itself is the history of the safekeeping of the promise, indeed that this safekeeping is concealed from itself as to what it is” (189-90). Taking this formulation into consideration, we can now suggest that the Anthropocene is the emergence of a fundamental change in the coming to presence of the very question of being on a planetary scale. The Anthropocene we are experiencing entails the on-going demise of the staying-away that saves being. It is also the expiration of the omission of the staying-away that allows for being’s self-saving preservation. In other words, the Anthropocene is the name of something truly sinister and unprecedented that is happening to the safeguarding of being. Something therefore is also happening to the safekeeping that is concealed from itself as to what it is. This would indicate that the very question of negativity surfaces now in ways that it has never done before. The Anthropocene, in other words, is the empirical unveiling—the exposure— of a silent urgency in the very dispensation of being, for it is the exhaustion of the promise of the self-saving preservation of being. This exhaustion is the origin of the increasing everyday awareness of the realities of on-going extinction, and therefore also of the epochal anxiety that underlies it.

The question now is whether one can even begin to address the anthropogenic dispensation of the being of beings that the Anthropocene silently demands, alternatively to the era of planetary techno-capitalist domination. But the problem is that the Anthropocene denotes the consummation and on-going collapse of the legitimacy and history of the entire Western tradition as a unique metaphysical bulwark against disorder and falsehood. In other words, in the age of Artificial Intelligence the Western tradition can no longer mediate between certitudo and falsum, and this harbors dire consequences for present and future reckonings with knowledge and politics.

Toward the end of Gaia: A New Way of Looking at Life on Earth James Lovelock observes that “there can be no prescription, no set of rules, for living within Gaia. For each of our different actions there are only consequences” (132). Lovelock appears to indicate that living in Gaia can only be a-principial, rather than a thetic extension of the Enlightenment principle of subjectivity and its will to power, as if the very theticism that lies at the heart of each and every hegemony will only fall short of what it takes to live with, and in, the Anthropocene that is already upon us. Lovelock’s formulation appears to indicate that there are no more paradigms available for application and definition. For instance, scientific climate modeling has attempted to apply specific paradigms, and therefore standardizations and uniformities to climate collapse. But we are now realizing that the paradigmatic attempts to define, or model, climate change have already failed us. Similarly, in The Climate of History in a Planetary Age the former postcolonial historian Dipesh Chakrabarty asks: “Has the period from 1750 to now been one of freedom or that of the Anthropocene? Is the Anthropocene a critique of the narratives of freedom? Is the geological agency of humans the price we pay for the pursuit of freedom?” (2021, 33-4) In response to his own fundamental question, Chakrabarty observes: “In some ways, yes” (2021, 34).

The Anthropocene marks the beginning of a collapse of a modern, humanist conceptual and cultural theticism constructed on the distinction between human history and natural history. In other words, Marx’s affirmation from the Eighteenth Brumaire that “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please” is more salient now than ever, though no longer for the reasons Marx proposes, for man’s history is being made increasingly not by human perception, consciousness, or misapprehension, but by anthropogenic force, which survives perfectly well with or without humanity. No humanist (colonial-modern-Christian) political hegemony can possibly overcome, subsume, or cast into oblivion the on-going collapse of humanism, for the Anthropocene is the never-before-seen destruction of the epoch of the subjectum itself. It is far more problematic than merely recognizing that humanity is in desperate need of new moral narratives (Maier), for history is no longer that of human development and progress via the imperium of reason, rationalization, and self-consciousness. Nor is it the history of counterhegemonic claims to subjecthood. It is something else entirely, which leads us inevitably to the question of whether there is now an image of a countermodern negativity, or of a recalcitrant outside, available to us from within the nihilism of contemporary anthropogenic force and capitalist accumulation?9

If we take seriously the idea that the Anthropocene is in fact the emergence of a previously unforeseen coming to presence of a timeless time, an epochless post-development epoch that is moving in a direction other than that of the conditions provided in and by modern industrialism and progress, and that it entails the unleashing of an unrelenting and unprecedented planetary negativity, then the tradition we understand as the colonial/modern—which encapsulates subaltern studies and its subsequent shift into the first avatar of decolonial thinking—must be assigned an entirely other place that our academic traditions have not even begun to delineate.

Following Descartes’ footsteps, Hegel had considered Nature to be a Proteus to be subdued in the name of human consciousness and societal advancement, as he sought “to find in this externality only the mirror of ourselves, to see in Nature a reflex of spirit” (445). In Hegel’s understanding “man”, as dialectical self-consciousness, anchors and guarantees “the suicide of nature, which is sacrificed in order to be resuscitated as Spirit” (Vioulac, I, 27). The planetary history of the Anthropocene and of its entire apparatus of development—including, of course, that of “actually existing socialism”—has been a decidedly Hegelian philosophical, and therefore metaphysical, political and economic affair.

However in 1801, that is, in the first years of the Industrial Revolution and over two decades before Hegel published his Philosophy of Nature, Friedrich Schelling had already indicated the need to de-potentialize, and thereby depose, the constitutive principle of all Cartesian philosophy, and therefore of all modern dialectical consciousness: “To see the objective [nature] in its first coming-into-being is only possible by de-potentializing the object of all philosophizing, which in the highest potency is = I, and then constructing, from the beginning, with it reduced to the first potency” (7). Schelling proposes the necessarily anti-philosophical, anti-Hegelian, deposing of the entire Cartesian ontology of subjective consciousness as a first step toward seeing anew, in the absence of the sacrifice of nature and its subsequent metaphysical resuscitation as Spirit.

The de-potentializing of the object of all philosophizing—thinking, that is, from within the destitution of subjectivity—would open thinking anti-philosophically to formless, as the double, or origin without an origin, of every subsequent Aufhebung and ontology of the subject. Formless would trace not the grounds for more consciousness, domination, philosophy—or for an other philosophy or politics—but for an anti-philosophy the abyssal negativity of which signals the absolute primacy of a nameless—infrapolitical—other that inhabits and undermines all humanist politics, technology, production, teleology, and thetic subjectivism.

As Georges Bataille put it in the late 1920s, “affirming that the universe resembles nothing and is only formless amounts to saying that the universe is something like a spider or spit” (31). The question haunts us therefore as to whether Schelling’s de-potentialization of the philosophical subject, which has been essentially cast into oblivion by the entire subsequent history of Hegelianism, would indicate the need for a non-thetic anti-philosophy extended in default of the metaphysical obligations and legacies of colonial and modern humanism; in other words, an anti-philosophical thinking that no longer indulges in “giving a frock coat to what is” (Bataille, 31), but that is akin to a spider or spit, devoid, that is, of metaphysics.

The destitution of the subject, and therefore of all hegemony thinking, would obligate us to address once again, as both Alberto Moreiras and John Kraniauskas did in 2000 in the wake of the subaltern studies project, the negativity of a differential relation to the history of originary and on-going primitive accumulation. Would this point “in the direction of an entirely other text”, rather than “in the direction of another presence, or another form of presence”, as Derrida pinpointed in 1968? It certainly appears that an entirely other text—entirely other, that is, than what Heidegger referred to as the historicist metaphysics of the Gestell, or ‘world picture’—is what is needed, and desperately. Whether it is possible in the machinic age of biopolitical absolutism and climate collapse is an entirely different problem, and this is the question that has arisen in only the last twenty-five years.

What is clear, in the end, is that formless—abyssal originary negativity as the breaking into history of history’s very unthinkable, in conjunction with the recalcitrant non-dialectical suffering of the contemporary—suggests the need for an anti-philosophical, infrapolitical, and posthegemonic move in the direction of being and of letting being be, rather than in the direction of more thetic subjectivity, at a time when being finds itself increasingly without asylum or safekeeping.

Perhaps it can still be in our hands to deprive philosophy of its enlightened, bourgeois adornments—which Bataille refers to as its metaphysical ‘frock coats’—by bringing things down to the level of spiders and spit. I understand this as going back down and into the concealed ground of the Hegelian onto-theological trappings of Spirit, self-consciousness and its dialectics of domination, in order to de-potentialize and thereby open them in preparation for the clearing of the un-prethinkable. But that would also mean a distinctly post-Latin American, non-humanist, post-ontological and posthegemonic engagement with originary terror in conjunction with the recalcitrant suffering of contemporary historicity simultaneously. This historicity still awaits us in our epoch of on-going primitive accumulation as we move in the direction of what is already upon us, and which until very recently remained occluded under the entire Hegelian apparatus of capitalist development and the spirit of its utopian political countermeasures. This is not an easy task at all, of course, but the alternative is the continuation of the metaphysical impasse we already inhabit on account of Hegel’s specter. 

The stakes of the task at hand first emerged in 2000 in the wake of the Latin American subaltern studies project and, clearly, they need to be advanced further now. However, we are forced under current conditions to advance them in consideration of the unsustainability of our unprecedented anthropogenic and technological non-dwelling on a planetary scale. And this implies the ruin of historically constituted university discourse such as Latin American Studies, as a means of engaging once again with the possibility of an alternative understanding of historicity at a moment of enormous upheaval in the spatial and technological arrangements of domination.

Notes

  1.  For the original thematization of the society of control, see Deleuze. ↩︎
  2. For a fundamental reckoning with the writing of the formless in the modern Latin American poetic tradition, see Rodríguez Matos (2017). ↩︎
  3. For the first systematic evocation of the posthegemonic relation between hegemony and what always escapes it, see Beasley-Murray (2011). ↩︎
  4. “¿No dice el Espíritu de las leyes que éstas deben ser propias para el pueblo que las hace?, ¿que es una gran casualidad que las de una nación puedan convertir a otra?, ¿que las leyes deben ser relativas a lo físico del país, al clima, a la calidad del terreno, a su situación, a su extension, al género de vida de los pueblos? . . . ¡He aquí el código que debíamos consultar y no el de Washington!” (quoted in Gómez-Martínez, 2). ↩︎
  5. The understanding of liberation that the first avatar of decolonial thinking came to uphold was first promoted at the Universidad Católica de Córdoba, in Argentina, by the Jesuit journal Stromata in 1970 around the essentially modernista question, “What is Latin American?” (Schutte, 177). It was then extended by the Franciscan journal Nuevo Mundo in 1973. In the translation of these debates into decolonial thinking, all heterogeneities, inconsistencies, and basic incompatibilities were erased, and Enrique Dussel became the sole philosopher of liberation. The so-called “Decolonial Option” consequently sought to articulate these three Latin American traditions with U.S.-styled identity politics, dependency theory, and Wallersteinian world-systems analysis, even though under current conditions the division of the world into core countries, semi-peripheral countries, and peripheral countries has succumbed to new spatial complexities inaugurated on a planetary scale by on-going primitive accumulation. ↩︎
  6. I use the term ‘undercommons’ as outlined in Harney and Moten (2013). ↩︎
  7. See Moraña, Dussel, and Jáuregui (2008) for the Latin Americanist expression of concern for the perception of postcolonial Anglo exclusion, which is a repetition of the concern that also lay at the heart of the “Founding Statement of the Latin American Subaltern Studies Group” (1993). ↩︎
  8.  For Anthropocene, see Zalasiewicz, Waters, Williams, and Summerhayes (2019). For Capitalocene, see Moore (2016). For Entropocene, see Stiegler (2018). For Narco-Accumulation, see Williams (2021). In the epoch of global climate collapse, what is striking is the uniformity of the technological domination of humanity on a planetary scale: dopamine—that is, the human as a living hormonal vessel and as a subject-object of attention span, adrenaline reserve, and expenditure—is now the post-territorial (post-European and therefore post-Latin American) product to be tracked, expropriated, and valorized. Algorithmic (cognitive) capitalism produces the biopolitical positing and domination of an always alien syntax that engulfs the entirety of individual and collective subjectivity, consciousness, will, and emotion, thereby making a mockery of consent and hegemony but not of expropriation, terror, value extraction, monetization, suffering, and domination. Algorithmic capitalism is biopolitical absolutism forcing human attachment to technological presencing itself, and any possible non-attachment is akin to inexistence since “non-attachment to busy-ness is not an option placed before our free will” (Schürmann, Will, 100). Subjectivity—that is, Descartes’ ‘I think’—no longer legislates on all there is. Now the alien syntax of the algorithm does that, and we are expected to conform to that syntax. ↩︎
  9. In Tiempo roto, Alberto Moreiras refers to the planetary negativity that consumes us as “terminal nihilism”: “To the two nihilisms that Friedrich Nietzsche thought, incomplete nihilism and consummated nihilism, we can now add a third figure: the terminal nihilism that our Anthropocene configures under the domination of techniques of infinite extraction that Verónica Gago talks about, and for which Heidegger proposed the term Gestell” (2024, 59-60). ↩︎

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