CANNIBAL METAPHYSICS1

Jean-Christophe Goddard 2

Starting with a hallucination by Spinoza the Marrano, Jean-Christophe Goddard invites us to reconsider the mixing characteristic of Brazil, a country where the natives devoured the
colonists. He suggests that we begin with a literal understanding of cannibalism.

In 1664, barely a century after what, in the famous founding document of Brazilian modernism, the "Cannibal Manifesto" (1928), Oswald
de Andrade called the "swallowing of the Bishop Sardinha" (when the first Portuguese Bishop of Brazil was cut up and devoured by
Caete Indians, in 1556), the Portuguese Marrano philosopher Bento de Espinosa, whose family chose Holland in preference to Brazil
when going into exile, wrote to the "very wise and prudent" Pierre Balling 3 to tell him about the singular visual hallucination that he had
suffered: the insistent mage seen on waking — all the more vividly because of his waning attention — of a "black, dirty Brazilian" that,
de Espinosa felt impelled to add, he "had never seen before." In an earlier letter. Balling asked the philosopher to explain a hallucination
of his own, when he heard the agonized groans of his son, who at the time was in good health. Now, one might suppose that if this
Bento de Espinosa, who insisted on being called Benedictus de Spinoza, the name under which he entered the Pantheon of
Philosophers in Europe, showed such concern at this hallucinatory presage, and took such care in answering Balling, his main purpose
was to clearly distinguish his case from that of his correspondent: on one side, the psychic power, conferred by love, of vividly imagining
events that might occur in the life of a loved one; on the other, simple retinal persistence at the moment of waking, of a dream image,
the simple effect on the imagination of an alteration of the body, as fever is the cause of delirium.

SPINOZA THE MESTIZO

The denial is flagrant. Because this image of the Brazilian becomes an "Ethiopian" only a few lines further, it has appropriately been
interpreted as a denial of Jewishness. The insulting character of the adjectives "black" and "dirty," which are reprised in the word
"Ethiopian", which in Greek means "people with burned faces", has been emphasized, and one could easily complete the analysis by
saying that the image of this total alterity of a man "never seen before," is the most insulting image of all: that of a "dirty Jew." It has also
been stressed that in the seventeenth century Brazil and Ethiopia were two spaces of Por tuguese colonization, but not enough
emphasis has been placed on a specific dimension shared by the two insults ("Brazilian" and "Ethiopian") when applied to Marranos:
hybridization. The image of the "dirty" Brazilian/Ethiopian was, primarily for Bento de Espinosa (in keeping with the meaning of the word
falasha which, in Amharic, designates Ethiopian Jews) the pejorative image of an exile, of an immigrant who, unlike what was possible
for Benedictus Spinoza in Golden Age Holland, was unable to free himself of his hybrid Marrano character, neither Jew nor Christian.
This hybridization was in fact redoubled because of colonization, since the Brazilian Marrano, as neither Portuguese nor
Jewish, was neither colonizer nor colonized. In other words, he was specifically "Brazilian" in the very sense that this paradoxical
identity is understood in relation to its anthropophagous origin and the mixing that it implies between the colonized and the colonizer; for,
as the Brazilian anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, the devouring of the colonists by the Tupinamba — an event that was widely
known in Europe in Spinoza's day thanks to the account given by Hans Staden, which was translated into Latin, Dutch and Portuguese
(True Story and Description of a Country of Wild, Naked, Grim, Man-eating People in the New World, America, 1557) — had as its end
point as much the becoming-Tupinamba of the whites as the becoming-white of the Tupinamba. This is attested by numerous letters
from Jesuits denouncing colonists for "going native" (as Viveiros de Castro puts it), marrying Indians, killing enemies in the terreiros, and
themselves becoming anthropophagi.
The appearance of this Renaissance image (which in fact is undatable, if we think that Spinoza locates this moment of
hallucination in a city where he was not living at the purported date of the event) is closely linked to the history of Portuguese
colonialism. As Gilles Deleuze has emphasized, any binary machine — and the machine of colonial power is certainly that — is not
crudely dualistic, but dichotomous, producing mixedness itself as a new binary element: if you are neither Jewish nor Christian, neither
Jewish nor Ethiopian, neither Jewish nor Portuguese, neither colonizer nor colonized, then you still have the choice between the
philosopher Benedictus de Spinoza (or Baruch Spinoza) and the half-breed Bento de Espinosa. It is this dichotomous machine — which
reaches far beyond the personality of the philosopher himself — which gave rise to the hallucinatory image of the Brazilian: a self-
image, an image of the Brazilian Self, crossbred, hybrid — the self of all those caught up in such a machine.
"Tupi or not Tupi, that is the question," wrote Oswald de Andrade in the Cannibal Manifesto, for this dichotomy is that of cannibal versus
non-cannibal. The symptomatic image of Spinozism, we may say (applying to Spinoza the concept mobilized by Georges Didi-
Huberman to analyze the construction, within madness, of the Warburgian theory of culture), is that of hybridization, of mixing, of the
indigenous devouring of the culture and religion of the West, of their polarities (it is indeed the same as that of Aby Warburg, so
effectively does his snake/lightning shaft liberate the affirmation of a "satanische Fresslust" [a Satanic pleasure in devouring or
gobbling] ). It is in the folly of this Brazilian-indigenous image that Spinoza constructs his philosophy.

CANNIBAL ANTHROPOLOGY AND PHILOSOPHY

Too much attention has been paid to the explanation of the hallucinatory vision of the son's death as indicating the imagination's power
to express the father's partaking of the essence of the son by virtue of love. Here we can very precisely gauge the remarkable
contribution of Viveiros de Castro's American-Indian anthropology and its sketch of what a "cannibal metaphysics" might be. According
to de Castro, the unconscious communication between father and son at the base of the veracious hallucination has three characteristic
features of Western metaphysics: it is intra-specific (it takes place between human beings); it is found on filiative production; and it
repeats the prototypical expression of the Other in the figure of the Friend or Loved One which makes philia the medium of knowledge.
The screen explanation presented to Balling is indeed that of Benedictus versus Bento. The repugnant image of the hybrid that
appeared to Bento (as the contemporary Brazilian philosopher, Bento Prado Junior, likes to point out), the image of the dirty Brazilian
signifying his own going native, carries within itself other metaphysical possibilities that the West would never have encountered if it had
not had the colonial experience of its own deglutition.
For de Castro, the attempt to make philosophical use of indigenous thought implies putting the Enemy's viewpoint, as
opposed to the Friend's, at the centre of our vision of ourselves (being ourselves by incorporating the enemy); that we substitute
relations of filiation and hereditary reproduction with movements of capture, of predation, relations of symbiosis and transversal
connections between heterogeneous elements; that substitute intra-specific communication with inter-specific becoming (as the
intensive, affective relation of the human to the non-human). Now, it is interesting that de Castro should find these characteristics of a
cannibal philosophy at work in A Thousand Plateaus : "Becoming-intense, becoming-animal, becoming-imperceptible."4 It is even more
striking that Deleuze and Guattari should then apply them while recollecting Spinoza ("Memories of a Spinozist, I and II"): first of all,
there is "a unity to the plane of nature which applies equally to the inanimate and the animate, the artificial and the natural," and "the
infinity of the modifications [...] are part of one another," and belong to a given individual in accordance with the relation of movement
and rest in which they are engaged; secondly, circulations of affects which are becomings ("unnatural" participations: a man becoming a
rat, a rat becoming a man) in accordance with relations of composition and decomposition that take place on the same plane of nature.
How is this singular coincidence between de Castro's cannibal anthropology and Deleuze and Guattari's metaphysics of
nature to be understood, if not via Spinoza - in other words, already, Brazil? Through the philosophical translation of indigenous thought
taking the form of a metaphysics of becomings, of hybridizations, of participations and orderings, all aberrant, within a nature conceived
as the multiplicity of multiplicities. This indigenous dimension of Spinozism — of their Spinozism — is surely what Deleuze and Guattari
were expressing when they presented their own way of proceeding as that of witches, and by writing, several times, "We, the witches." 5
The hallucinatory image of the "dirty Brazilian" was the image of the cannibal thought that Bento de Espinosa was going to introduce
into Europe, in a subterranean kind of way, until the Spinozism long hidden by the readings imposed by the problematics of white
metaphysics finally showed its true face, as a creature of mixed blood.

LITERAL CANNIBALISM AND GLOBAL CANNIBALISM

Does this mean that the transition from the insulting and violent image of the dirty hybrid to the conceptual edification of indigenous
thought was the same as the transition made by modern Brazil from literal anthropophagy (eat ing men) to anthropophagic ontology
(anthropophagy as a way of being): the capture of all alterities, mixing, the deglutition of differences, pillage, multiplicity as instruments
of a pacific self-creation.? For de Castro, the disappearance of literal cannibalism strengthened its general, ontological dimension. The
victory of Indian anthropophagy, the application of its bellicose vengeance, to the Western colonizer, thus culminated, perhaps, in the
emergence of what Suely Rolnik calls a "flexible subjectivity," which is essentially traversed by the Other, engaged in the twentieth
century in systematic experimentation with processes of hybridization and fusion, the deterritorialization and creation of new
configurations, from de Andrade's modernist movement (1920s), to concrete poetry (1950s), Neo-Concretism in the visual arts (late
1950s, early 60s), tropicalismo in music (1960s) and all the way to certain aspects of the policies of former president Lula, which
Giuseppe Cocco analyzed as a "cannibal politics" in his recently published Mundo Braz.
Now, Rolnik has also shown the possible ambiguity of this victory, assuming this consists of just such a triumph of the ontological
over the literal. She has shown how, starting in the 1980s, thanks to the emerging new technologies for producing and reproducing
images, capitalism, having become "cultural/informational", took advantage of the anthropophagic flexibility of the modern subject, of its
essential mixedness, to produce and sell off-the-peg models of hybrid subjectification that could betaken up by anyone and endlessly
renewed. Above aII, she showed how this globalization of anthropophagy had the unintended consequence of banishing the disquiet
and inconstancy that naturally accompany any process of hybridization by guaranteeing, through the new economy of the cognitive
capitalism that multiplies world-images capable of temporarily structuring subjectivity, "a hedonistic kind of existence, smooth and
unruffled, eternally stable."
This, perhaps, is what is at stake in a defence of literal anthropophagy. De Andrade's statements to the effect that cannibalism
did not originate in hunger seems to plead against literal anthropology and in favour of a mainly ontological dimension. And yet it was
again the Cannibal Manifesto that inspired notably the "hunger aesthetic" of Glauber Rocha, founder of Brazil's Cinema Novo in the
1960s. Deleuze, who saw Rocha's work as the supreme example of modern anti-colonial political cinema, noted the "strange positivity"
of hunger in Rocha: the violence of the starving, the eater of earth, eater of roots, who steals and kills in order to eat, is anthropophagic
violence, the one that, in an aberrant communication of all forms of violence (the violence of owners, bandits, prophets and saints),
sends all social conditions into a trance, devouring differences in a movement that abolishes all prospect of progress and order.
That is why, said Rocha was why there is "an anthropophagic relation between the characters in Antonio das Mortes [1969]:
the teacher eats Antonio, Antonio eats the cangaceiro, Laura eats the commissioner, the professor eats Laura, the murderers eat the
people, the professor eats the cangaceiro, This anthropophagic relation is one of freedom." I should add that in the popular Portuguese
spoken by Rocha, eating also means fucking.
The cannibal scene in Antonio das Mortes is a bodily confrontation of the interlaced enemies/lovers, rolling bloodily over each
other on the dusty ground of the Sertão. This collusion of murderous violence and sexual predation, to the detriment of the social order,
should not comes as a surprise we know what the ogre Gilles de Rais did to children. What Glauber Rocha set out to do was make
cannibalism literal again, at the very heart of the global anthropophagy of cognitive capitalism. He did so by "imposing the violence of his
images and his sounds in 22 international festivals." Here was a way of giving a voice to the image of the "black and dirty Brazilian"
without which Bento de Espinosa would not have bequeathed us the heritage of Spinozism. Translation, C. Penwarde

1 published in artpress 2 – March/April 2011 – Special issue CANNIBALS ALL coordinated by Jeanette Zwingenberger

2 Jean-ChristopheGoddard (born1959) is professor of philosophy at the Université deToulouse Mirail (France). He is the founder and coordinator of the international university
consortium EuroPhilosophie, which brings together European and Brazilian universities in a shared academic project. In his book Violence et subjectlvité. Derrida, Deleuze, Maldiney
(Librairie Vrin, 2008) he takes an anthropological and iconological approach to modern French thought,

3 Letter 17 from Spinoza to Pierre Balling (July 20,1664).

4 In the tenth chapter of Mille Plateaux by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Paris: Editions deMinuit, 1980.

5 Idem.