 Welcome to the Development Studies Seminar. We're delighted to welcome Dr Alberto Toscano, who's here today to talk about the invention of the savage philosophy, politics and the ideologies of development. Alberto is a reader in critical theory and the co-director of the Centre for Philosophy and Critical Theory at Goldsmiths at the University of London. His books include the Theatre of Production, Philosophy and Individuation between Kant and De Luz, and The Uses of an Idea, and with Geoff Kinkall, Cartographies of the Absolute. He has translated several works by Alan Badiw, as well as Antonia Negri, Furio Jesse and Franca Fortini. He has sat on the editorial board of the Journal Historical Materialism since 2004 and he's series editor of the Italian list for seagulls books. He's currently working on two book projects, the first on tragedy as a political form, the second on philosophy capitalism and real abstraction. Alberto is going to speak for 45 to 50 minutes and then we will hear a response and some comments from Dr Subir Sena, who is senior lecturer in institutions and development from here in the department, and then we will take questions from the floor before we have a final summing up by Alberto. If you're tweeting, then use the hashtag Soas Dev Studies and ESRC. I am obviously chairing, so I'll be waving notes around if anyone goes on for too long. And I think we're ready to start. Many thanks to the department and to Subir also for being a respondent to all of you for coming along and also especially to Feizi for the invitation. So this paper is part of a project to engage in a sense from the angle of the history of philosophy, which is something I've dabbled in with the question of the savage and the place of the savage in the genealogies and conflicts even within the European philosophical tradition as part of a way to engage with contemporary debates about the decolonisation of philosophy and of the curriculum more broadly. And part of it was actually the effect of a brief visit as a visiting lecturer at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver and partly occasioned by the fact that the whole figure of the Canadian was already present in early 18th century French and German philosophy as a sort of object of speculation by which Canadian was meant the indigenous population especially of what is today called Quebec. I won't talk about that today but I just wanted to sort of note the sources for the project. So the talk has an epigram from sorry, the French political anthropologist Pierre Clastres, who I'll return to towards the conclusion. He writes in a very important essay, Copernicus and the Savages from his book A Society Against the State. It is imperative to accept the idea that negation does not signify nothingness, that when the mirror does not reflect her own likeness it does not prove there is nothing to proceed. So the widespread call to decolonise philosophy and the social sciences demands a preliminary assessment of the shaping power of the colonial relation across different disciplinary histories. Such an inquiry will involve an excavation of how the European encounter with and exploitation of other people's condition the different forms taken by what the French philosopher Etienne Ballibar has called the problem of anthropological difference which is in part also of course the problem of otherness more broadly. My concern tonight is to explore how philosophers adopted, adapted and transformed and in a sense invented the figure of the savage from the mid to late 16th to the late 18th century. The savage is a kind of living negation or inverted image of so-called civilised western humanity. Further I'd also like to think about how this invention was entangled at key junctures with the emergence of some of the ideological components of later conceptions of development as well as the seeds of the critical appropriation of political economy in historical materialism and Marxism more broadly. Now from Horkheimer and Adorno's location of anti-Semitism within the dialectic of enlightenment to Said's Orientalism, from Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex to Cedric Robinson's Black Marxism the critical history of western philosophy and rationality has abounded in explorations of the intimate if often obscure bonds between the speculative subjections or the kind of ideal subjections of otherness and its social material effects or broadly has reflected on the ideological and material and political role of forms of othering. The blatant instrumentality of the idea of the savage to the colonial project from the Spanish conquest to the ongoing dispossession of indigenous people across the globe would appear to militate against any sustained and nuanced exploration of the idea. It just seemed to be a kind of crass tool for colonial or imperial rule. Surely we might be seen to be dealing with a bluntest of racist and legitimising myths something to be fought politically rather than discussed academically. Now for all the partial truth of that statement in what follows I want to propose that in part contrary to this justifiable reflex there is much to be gained in an investigation of the uses to which the idea of the savage was put by European thinkers in the crucible of colonial modernity including for contemporary debates about decolonisation of an academic or perhaps even a practical sort. So what kind of other is the savage? At first and perhaps second and third glance as well the savage seems to differ from the others that have sub-magnetised 20th century critical thought. It seems to lack the unsettling subversive qualities which reasons confrontation with alterity is often deemed to have for instance in texts like Foucault's history of madness for instance. Reflecting recently on the articulation of difference, otherness and exclusion in the phenomenon of racism Balibar in dialogue with Edward Said's Orientalism presents that book as a paradigmatic study of something like an essential otherness an uncanny double. An uncanny double Balibar says regarding Said's book who is not only an adversary but embodies a negation of one's moral and aesthetic and intellectual values another who at the same time in the most contradictory manner has to be constructed as a passive object of representation study dissections, classifications and an active subject, so another who is also an active subject of threats or simply of an alternative path to civilization and salvation. He goes on, here's the quote The construction of the other is a construction of an alienated self where all the properties attributed to the other are inversions and distortions of those vindicated for oneself where indeed the self is nothing but the other's other whose identity and stability is permanently asserted and secured in the imaginary through the representation of an essential other or an essentialised other whose identity and this is a kind of key point in this respect arrives from the other in inverted form. Now, does the savage fit such a nuanced image of how alterity operates in the construction of dominant forms of identity? I think the answer is a mixed one. On the one hand as I hope to detail below the savage is in some sense the perfect other the product of a matrix or even an accumulation of negations he is exactly what we are not especially in a lot of these colonial texts. On the other hand largely because this negation is very formal at times very one dimensional the savage is rarely if at all in a lot of these texts from the mid 16th to the 18th century though I will go through some of the exceptions the occasion for a limit experience or an uncanny encounter of the kind that the likes of Foucault talked about in terms of madness. It seems to serve at best as the locus of an ironic reversal and skepticism about the vaunted values and virtues of the civilized. A sort of ironic mirror so to speak but not necessarily a particularly nuanced one. No doubt this is also an effect of the reliance of this philosophical literature on missionary literature the writings especially of Jesuit priests for instance already steeped in classical and Christian images of otherness rather than on the actual encounters between settlers and first nations. The figure of the savage in this regard has been seen by a lot of scholars of this issue as a product of what they call comparative negation. The Italian historian Sergio Landucci who wrote a landmark book called The Philosopher and the Savages unfortunately still untranslated into English starts his periodization of philosophy's invention of the savage with Michel de Montaigne's very famous short essay of the cannibals or on the cannibals depending on the translation. This is a text which in John Florio's early 17th century translation includes the following famous lines referring to the native populations encountered by French colonists and missionaries in Brazil or what they called Antarctic France. Yeah indeed. It is a nation would I answer Plato he's of course referring to the Republic that have no kind of traffic, no knowledge of letters, no intelligence of numbers, no name of magistrate nor of politics superiority, no use of service or riches or of poverty, no contracts, no successions, no dividends, no occupations but idle, no respect of kindred but common, no apparel but natural, no maneuvering of lands, no use of wine, corn or metal. That engraving by Taylor de Breit which some of whose other engraving I'll turn to later is from one of the accounts of this sort of absurd mise-en-scène of the supposed acts of cannibalism as a kind of collective barbecue bearing no ethnographic verity nevertheless is based on one of the travel accounts that Imontegna had also used. Now in Montegna this logic of negation or privation or lack was intended to frame the radical diversity identified as part of human nature at a more philosophical level and skeptically to puncture the superior pride of the so-called civilized. He meant to use the account of the cannibal to relativise the very category of barbarism which is one of the categories that accompanies in quite complex ways a category of the savage throughout this history and by proposing that the savages greater closeness to nature condemned the bastardising effects of our artificial customs one of the reasons why he's been linked also to various mythologies of the golden age that projected themselves onto this figure of the savage. Montegna would then fill in the framework of otherness or difference by negation with descriptions of forms of life especially activities of warfare and indeed of anthropology or cannibalism itself were incommensurable enough with those of his contemporaries in France to undermine dominant doctrines of his time that defined something like a universalising political anthropology. So part of the skeptical position and the reason why he's been seen including by the likes of Claude de Vissau as a precursor of variants of cultural relativism was an attack on forms of medieval and renaissance, conceptions of human universality above all the Christian idea of the consensus gentium of the agreement of the peoples and Aristotle's vision of man as a political animal. So in some sense that was those were some of the universalising tropes that the figure of the cannibal was meant to undo. Though the uses and effects of Montegna's savage in which negation and difference heralded a skeptical and ironic suspension of Europe's divisive confidence in its own superiority were of a kind, so generous his effort at a dispassion and description of indigenous life was perhaps unique the logic of comparative negation so all of these you know no kind of traffic no magistrate etc was immensely common across this period. So this just to reiterate even though it's a very significant variant of it is not in any way unique to Montegna in fact it's the aspect of cannibals that she shares with most thinkers. So just to give you a couple of examples but they are really legion. In one of the very first travel narratives from the new world a famous letter to his patron, Lorenzo de' Medici the Florentine navigator, a medic of Vespucci the one after whom the continent continents were named not by himself by the cartographer Marcator in 1530 this is what Vespucci declared so this is a letter from the early 1500s they have no cloth either of wool linen or cotton since they needed not neither do they have goods of their own but all things are held in common they live together without king, without government and each is his own master they marry as many wives as they please etc etc etc then beyond the fact that they have no church no religion and are not idolaters what more can I say they live according to nature and may be called Epicureans rather than Stoics it shows in part also how relentless the ancient Greek reference was for all of these debates there are no merchants among their number nor there is barter the nations wage war upon one another without art or order in 1505 a version of Vespucci's own comparative negation would capture one of the first visual representations of Amerindian peoples in Europe so this is the 1505 engraving Columbus writing in 1493 announcing his discovery in another famous letter spoke of the natives of Hispaniola as having no iron and steel nor any weapons nor are they fit there on too in 1511 Peter, Martyr, Dangaria and another landmark text for the European perception of indigenous peoples of the Americas would write in similar terms beginning the letter again with this what turns out to be a kind of peculiarly utopian trope perhaps despite itself land is as common as the sun and water, mine and thine the seeds of all mischief have no place with them so this also belongs again to this kind of resonance of a golden age figure as Margaret Hodgdon has shown citing these and other examples from the early 16th century passages such as this formed what she calls conventionalized statements not unique to any one author or particularly philosophical in orientation the barbarous or savage other was defined by the privation the lack of the innumerable elements of western civilization law, property, sovereign power the mechanical arts agriculture, mathematics, writing commerce money and so on this particular convention the negative itemizing of difference is neon ubiquitous from the 16th century onwards and can be registered across travellers' chronicles in enlightenment in psychopedias and dictionaries and from Kant's anthropology to Darwin's voyages but there is also nothing particularly modern about this ethnocentric logic of contrast with the other who only exists as an absence or negative of the self one can encounter it in the 12th century old French Romand Alexander where the Indian Brahmin were described as having no agriculture no iron, no building, no fire, no bread, no wine no clothing, etc but also an ancient Roman and Greek accounts of the nomadic Scythians and it's also uncanny how much in these colonial travel narratives, etc there is just a kind of quotation or mapping of these classical figures of barbarism or otherness on to the Amerindian populations so Strabo in the first century BC writes about Scythians as knowing nothing about the storing of food or about the peddling of merchandise either etc so this monotony of comparative negation is no surprise if we reflect on the extent to which renaissance and early modern thinkers cognize the world through frameworks compounded from ancient Roman and Greek traditions and their biblical hybrids the new world savage is always haunted by ancient utopias of golden ages or alternatively by classical figures of barbarism or at times by both as Hayden White has suggested in his study of the forms of wildness what he calls the forms of wildness that preceded the emergence of the colonial and modern figure of the savage what we are dealing with in this pattern is what he calls a technique of ostensive self-definition by negation or what he calls a creation of antitypes so the savage would be precisely one of these antitypes in a particularly potent one from a certain angle the modern savage could be seen as the illusory realization of the fantastical figure very present across European cultures in the pre-colonial period of the wild man which had menaced and enlivened the real and psychic margins of European cultures in antiquity in the Middle Ages and of course here one could enter into a whole debate about the ways in which imaginaries, fantasies and cultural tropes internal to the experience of European cultures including their own internal forms of racialization preempted, preceded and were projected onto the colony which also in many ways dulls the extent to which one thinks that the encounter with otherness et cetera was what produced these figures of savagery so did anything uncanny remain in the formalization, projection and spatialization of the pre-colonial homosilvaticus or wild man onto the native peoples of the Americas anything that would confront a colonizing rationality with the experience of its limits in a sense I just want to continue to see to what extent there are points at which the figure of the savage somehow causes the kind of unsettling uncanniness and disturbance that someone like Balabar mentioned in the quote before now we might be tempted to single out the idea of the noble savage as such a limit but such an identification would be mistaken as a whole slew of scholars have shown the noble savage is largely a retroactive ideological construction about the positions that people held in the 16th, 17th and 18th century and in fact in a very interesting book by Ter Ellingson it's argued quite persuasively that it's in fact a late 19th century British imperial debate which creates the figure of the noble savage as a way of warning people against the supposed Russoian primitivism and instead supporting the virtues of various imperial missions. Now building on a suggestion by another historian Michel Duchet we could further argue that to the extent that the reality of the savage world is trapped in the network of negations it is the very formalism of these negations so the very kind of repetitious, not this, not that which I've already gone through which ironically opens them up to a quasi structuralist play of combinations and inversions as well as the emergence of a kind of set of negative utopias no mine, no thine, no commerce, no money and so on and so forth. As I will suggest in a moment I think it also matters to the historical mutation of the figure of the savage which negations take precedence so I think it's very significant once one turns to how the figure of the savage is used especially by modern political philosophers Hobbes and Locke above all what is the order? What is the precedence? What matters most? Not property, not money, not religion, etc. Is the savage primarily the human without property or in the positive vein with common possessions without religion or with non-monotheistic spiritual practices without government or with equality without industriousness or with freedom in the sense that every negation can be shadowed by some positive figure, so the negation of property for instance by that of the commons. As concerns utopias that in moments of cultural, political and economic crisis we could see the empty type as becoming potentially a positive type even we could add a kind of prototype. Rather than a positive valuation of indigenous Amerindian societies, though this is not wholly absent for instance in the writings of certain missionaries the nobility in the sense of affirmative value of the savage lies in its negativity. By now I imagine, especially with those various quotes some of you may have already heard echoing in these litanies of comparative negation August Blanqui's famous libertarian communist slogan Nidia Nimetra, no gods, no masters literally appears in a number of these quotes already in the 16th century. Now this negative dialectic of savage dystopia and colonial utopia is present in what is perhaps the most well known literary instantiation of the savage as the comparative negation of the civilized. This is Gonzalo's evocation in act two scene one of Shakespeare's atempest of the anti-political commonwealth that he would impose had he the chance on Prospero's island. In the commonwealth I would by contraries execute all things for no kind of traffic would I admit no name of magistrate, letter should not be known richest poverty and use of service none contract succession, born, bond of land, tilt, vineyard none no use of metal, corn or wine or oil no occupation, all men idle all and women too but innocent and pure, no sovereignty. All things in common nature should produce without sweat or endeavor treason, felony, sword, pike, knife, gun or need of any engine would I not have but nature should bring forth of its own kind all foison, all abundance to feed my innocent people. Now a Shakespeare scholars began to notice in the late 18th century and continue to discuss to this day the speech is just a kind of plagiarism or detourniment of Montaigne's of cannibals which Shakespeare had read in this John Florio translation. Of course, as Hodgin has argued if it is indeed the case as it very much seems to be that Shakespeare took this from Montaigne then Shakespeare borrowed from the least original most conventional of Montaigne's musings on the philosophical lessons of Brazilian cannibalism. What is perhaps more telling and perhaps more critically interesting in Shakespeare is that this is a European's utopia of the island as a kind of tabula rasa where one may elide or invert civilisation in its discontents, not a description of the so-called natives who receive in the figure of Caliban a much more pejorative but also much more unsettling and interesting image. Where in the presence here perhaps of a kind of secondary or imaginary colonisation the one that projects onto savage colonised lands spatialising it a European desire for the negation of one's own civilisation. A desire which, as Hayden White suggests, inverts the valence of the antotype in moments of cultural crisis. Shakespeare, and this is also the brilliance of this whole passage, in some sense punctures the certainties of this colonial utopian imagination with the interjection of the other figure Antonio's Real Politique moment when he says to Gonzalo after he's enumerated this fantasy of the commons, the latter end of his commonwealth forgets the beginning. Gonzalo's withering of a way of the state in the colonies forgets the birth of his commonwealth the clearing of his commonwealth that it is a fact of trees and felony sword pike knife guns. Now when the Martinican anti-colonial poet and politician M.S.Ear adapted Shakespeare's play in his own A Tempest in 1969 the words he put in Gonzalo's mouth have also spoke to the limits of his negative and primitivist colonial utopia. This is Gonzalo in Sezer. I mean that if the island is inhabited, as I believe, and if we colonize it, as is my hope, then we have to take every precaution not to import our shortcomings. Yes, what we call civilization. They must stay as they are, savages noble and good savages free without any complexes or complications. Something like a pool granting eternal youth where we periodically come to restore unified souls. A very corrosive reading of the already pretty salient subtext in Shakespeare as well. Now I haven't forgotten about philosophy or its history and it seems fitting now to turn to the most fiercely anti-utopian of modern philosophers Thomas Hobbes who's a crucial author in a number of these histories of the relationship between philosophy and the figure of the savage, especially the work of the Italian historian Landucci. With Hobbes we can briefly explore how notwithstanding the seemingly trans-historical immobility, invariance, portability of the savages as this kind of anti-type what seemed to be the same kind of negations can be the bearers of very different philosophical contents and projects. So four decades after Shakespeare's Tempest Hobbes's Leviathan depicted the state of nature in the following very well-known terms. The first half of the quotation. During the time men live without a common power to keep them all in all, they are in condition which is called war. In such condition there is no place for industry because the fruit thereof is uncertain and consequently no culture of the earth, no navigation or use of the commodities that may be imported by sea no commodious building, no instruments of moving and removing such things require much force, no knowledge of the face of the earth, no account of time no arts, no letters, no society and which is the worst of all continual fear and danger of violent death and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short. Now modern political philosophy is arguably born of this matrix of negations juxtaposing an imaginary that is both formalistic and terrifying in its idea of pure privation. In the state of nature a privation that leads to the imperative necessity of the state what Hobbes famously called that artificial man. The Hobbes who was personally involved in the colonial enterprise as a stockholder of the Virginia company and here depicted a massacre in Jamestown was in 1621 was arguably one of the haunting images of war that also accompanied him. Hobbes spoke of what he called the savages of America sparingly, again notwithstanding his commercial participations, but he did so crucial points in his over and the role of ethnological accounts of North American forms of life inshoring up or verifying Hobbes' political anthropology should not be underestimated. Homo homony lupus est man as a wolfed man was after all apparently was first used in a colonial travel narrative. Two paragraphs after the very famous and very widely quoted formulation solitary poor and nasty brutish and short and anticipating the response of a skeptical reader who would think this is just a kind of philosophical thought experiment or fancy Hobbes knows the following from which the second bit of the quote is taken. It may paradventure be thought that there was never such a time nor condition of war as this and I believe it was never generally so over all the world but there are many places where they live so now. That's not an insignificant moment. For the savage people in many places of America and when he says in many places of America it's also parenthetically interesting that there's a whole elaborate debate about the problems faced by philosophers, proto-ethnologists missionaries etc. and differentiating between the so called savages ie Amerindian people without visibly state like structures of power and the Inca or the Aztec which were often put in an entirely different category. So he says for the savage people in many places of America except the government of small families the concord were of dependence on natural lust, have no government at all and live at this day in that brutish manner as I said before. How so ever may be perceived what manner of life there would be were there no common power to fear by the manner of life which men that have formerly lived under a peaceful government used to degenerate into civil war. So it's contemporary civil wars and the condition of the so called savages of America as a kind of evidence for what is otherwise seemingly deductive or quasi kind of transcendental argument. Now a number of elements of Hobbes' usage of the savage antitype are worth pausing on. The first is that while Hobbes firmly rejects Aristotle's political anthropology and psychology so a psychology in which man was a political animal in which being in a society and being in a city being in a civic space were convertible with one another another. He rejects this especially by affirming the thoroughly artificial character of politics. So there's not a human teleology towards the political in the same way that Aristotelians including in his own time would have thought. This also means that he removes all of the bases very significant to justifications by certain theologians of the Spanish conquest that the Amerindian people were natural slaves. That they were somehow anthropologically and psychologically lacking and therefore demanding some kind of slavery or rule. But what he does do in this artificial vein is affirm an identity between social life and life under a state. Not in the natural sense but in the artificial sense. So there's both a rejection of Aristotle in a very different vein which marks out Hobbes' modernity an identification of social life which involves industry and property and commerce etc. with the need to have life under a state. The state like property itself is a fairly artificial institution whereas if we can speak of a natural state among human beings this will be a kind of state of civil war. Though he certainly situated the savage on an inferior rung in the hierarchy of what he called the civilized arts Hobbes like a 17th century rationalist contemporaries could be seen to maintain an ultimately homogenous and paradoxically egalitarian philosophical anthropology. Social and political difference for Hobbes were necessary but they were not natural. This is also very interesting to think in fact that the kind of extreme racist statements easily found in the likes of David Hume or indeed Voltaire are completely absent from the cognitive space of the likes of Descartes and Hobbes which is not an insignificant realization. Now this also involved positing that in the contemporary savage condition one could read the past of European countries themselves. This is the perception of the other as alachronic living in another previous time and in a space other than time which Johannes Fabian juxtaposed to the notion of non-western cultures as co-evil which he saw as part of a different anthropological gaze. It is a view that's painfully manifest in all of those anthropological visions of the savage as a kind of living fossil. This is what Pierre Claster identifies and as what he calls the ancient western conviction that history is a one way street, that societies without power are the image of what we have ceased to be and that for them our culture is the image of what they have to become. Now this theme of the savage as the past and the present so to speak later crystallized in John Locke's famous dictum in the beginning the whole world was America and this is an important appearance in Hobbes himself in 1642 in the Elements of Law where he writes of quote the experience of savage nations that live at this day and by the history of our ancestors so this is a kind of short circuit. This interjection of the savagery projected into the Americans into Europe is also present in the iconography and in the frontispieces that accompanied so for instance Hobbes's Decivet which quotes the engravings by Theodore Debris of a book on the conquest of Virginia so you can see here the figures of Imperium and Libertas behind Libertas you see humans hunting humans this is exactly the image that's taken from the same image of the back of Theodore Debris accounts of Virginia which again is the place where Hobbes had his own colonial interests the visual juxtaposition of the sovereign Imperium on the left and it's a cutrimence of production science, security, farming etc and savage Libertas on the right could not be a pithiar counterpart to the practice of comparative negation the savages on the right civilized on the left at the same time however it indicates the openly repressed utopian dimension of modern political philosophy which in Hobbes but also quite explicitly in Locke and Adam Smith after him recognizes that the security order and production are gained at the cost of freedom freedom is in a sense what needs to be sacrificed for a production to exist or at least a certain type of freedom the iconography also shows us how much the imagination of the Americas in a classical visual and political culture one which in the case of Debris compendium made graphic the link between new world and old world savagery so for instance Debris accompanied his plates on Virginia with plates supposedly depicting the savage state of the earlier inhabitants of the British Isles the Picts so this is again how the notion is that there is this sort of short circuit between the new world space of savagery and the savage past and the racialized savage past of Europe itself attention to Hobbes' own use of the savage anti type instructs us that rather than representing an ethnocentric invariant across western history it shifted in historically significant ways and that these shifts were articulated at least in part in terms of what we could call a hierarchy of negations in other words Hobbes' list largely seems to match those of Montaigne and indeed seems to echo those ancient and medieval cases I mentioned but in it one negation reigns supreme the negation of the state it is from this or rather not necessarily from its negation from its absence or lack that from the savage absence of sovereign government that everything else follows the absence of laws property of security of agricultural development productive labour of the arts and so on contrast the dislocation of this hierarchy by Locke for whom it is the absence of property and land and the division of labour attended there too which is the dominant negation from which the others including especially that of government follow so there is a complete difference in this order of negation which has massive influence on questions of political philosophy this recombination of comparative negation from the problem of political order or security in Hobbes to that of productive development and property in Locke will be crucial in opening the way for what some historians including Landucci and indeed Anthony Pagdon see as a move of the philosophical figure of the savage beyond this kind of moral axiomatic comparative negation which can go from dystopia to romanticism towards the placing of the savage within a historical and materialist problematic of social development so in some sense at least according to some of these histories it is moving away from Hobbes' primacy of the state towards a way of thinking made possible by the primacy of property in Locke and then of ways of living or means of subsistence in Montesquieu that and the 18th century the late 18th century the enlightenment and classical political economy can start to develop this kind of capitalist conception of social development in which means of subsistence serve as a basis on which the superstructure of laws, states property, government, the arts and religion reside this is the paradigm that will be fundamental to the development of classical political economy and its philosophical anthropology above all in the work of the Scottish Enlightenment from William Robertson's history of America to Adam Smith's writings on law history and economics now for historians like Landucian in English Roland Ronald Meek in his famous book Social Science and the Ignoble Savage which in a sense presents the Scottish Enlightenment as a kind of rather virtuous precursor of Marxism for such historians not withstanding all of its shortcomings this bourgeois social science of development will mark a crucial step between the formalism beyond the formalism of the civilized and the barbers in the direction of a kind of positive knowledge of social and cultural change and conflict this progressive history in which the Scottish Enlightenment is Marxism's scientific precursor has to incorporate to my mind a little too quickly and a little too smoothly the acknowledged fact that modern racism is a key function of the shift from a rationalist to a sociohistorical conception of the savage but it must also to my mind under play the way in which the framework of negation is transmuted but not abandoned in these kind of ethnological and anthropological writings that accompanies Scottish Enlightenment notions of development this is manifest above all in the endurance of the lock in axiom that from the absence or lack of property there derive all of the other absences, lacks and lags that pertain to the savage condition and it is demonstrating the extremely selective way in which the writers of the Scottish Enlightenment kind of assimilated and edited the travel narratives of Jesuit missionaries in North America to minimize their agricultural practices for instance which didn't really fit into the stages history to marginalize the record of collective political deliberation in order to argue that they hadn't developed particularly elaborate state forms if we abandon the prejudice whereby historicism even if laced with the property ideologies of racial capitalism is to be preferred to rationalism a la Hobbes or skepticism a la Montaigne if only as a precursor of Marxism we can nevertheless draw I think an important lesson from these studies of the figure of the savage and especially from Landucci's the philosopher and the savages where he identifies the key turning point in the history of European philosophies and the savage in the thesis and this is I think key that there can be societies without a state so this is for Landucci a kind of moment of cognitive and philosophical discovery especially in the 18th century engagement with North American North American indigenous peoples the sharpest statement of this anti-Hobbesian argument which seeks to counter an identification of social life with governed life established in Europe from Aristotle onwards is to be found in a text from Leibniz from 1711 Leibniz is responding to these very peculiar writings of a French soldier of fortune especially this fictionalized dialogue with an indigenous philosopher and this is what Leibniz writes the Iroquois and the Huron have reversed the excessively universal political maxims of Aristotle and Hobbes they have shown that entire peoples can live without magistrates and without quarrels but the rudeness of the savages shows that it is not so much necessity by the inclination to go towards the good and approach happiness by mutual assistance that is a foundation of societies and states a year earlier in a letter also engaging with his reading of Langton Leibniz had subverted the logic of comparative negation even more thoroughly writing that it is entirely truthful that the Americans of these regions live together without any government but in peace they know no fights nor hatred nor battles or not many except against men of different nations and languages I would almost say that we are dealing with a political miracle unknown by Aristotle and ignored by Hobbes so to conclude whatever the truthfulness of such claims which of course were also staked on a largely entirely fictional text like the one of Baron de Lontan it is striking that Leibniz has mentioned of a political miracle opens up a possibility very distant from most European and philosophical responses to the encounter with the indigenous populations of the Americas namely that rather than a negation of Europe and its notions of the political a negation that may be utopian or subversive but which is entirely drawn from within an imaginary repertoire of Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian sources that perhaps the encounter with North American societies may have required a different and unprecedented thinking of politics. As many commentators have detailed the colonial encounter with the indigenous population of the Americas was one marked in the intellectual sphere by the assimilation to models, myths conceptual imaginaries and formal taxonomies that populated the European mind in that period. An encounter in which comparativism was laced with the violence of an imperialist instrumental rationality In this sense the idea of the savage largely served as a screen in that regard. Very rarely was there a sense as in Leibniz's political miracle that the people of the Americas could force Europe to dislocate to expatriate its legal, political or economic philosophies. In a sense European intellectual life would have to wait until the second half of the 20th century for the emergence of radical trends in anthropology to unfold the kind of miracle where of Leibniz spoke. And to conclude with this Pierre Claster's Society Against the State for instance could be read as an extended elaboration of the empty Aristotelian and empty Hobzian effects of the encounter with Amerindian people first glimpse by Leibniz. From his field works among the Guayaki Indians in Palagwai as in the evidence of so much anthropological work across the Americas Claster would draw a drastic challenge to the anthropology of the West namely in the ubiquity in both North and South America of societies where political power was not or indeed politics was not synonymous with the dialectic of obedience and command with the monopolisation of violence and the separation of a political sphere. Claster would even go so far as portraying Amerindian forms of chieftum as collective strategies to prevent the emergence of politics as sovereign domination. As he commented one is confronted then by a vast constellation of societies in which the holders of what elsewhere would be called power are actually without power where the political is determined as a domain beyond coercion and violence beyond hierarchical subordination where in a word no relationship of command obedience is in force. This is a major difference of the Indian world and I'll stop here so we can open up for questions next. Thank you very much Alberto. We're now going to have about five minutes of commentary and response from Dr Subir Sinar. For those of you who don't know him Subir is a senior lecturer in the department of development studies with research expertise among other things in institutional change, social movement, state society relations and South Asian politics. Where is everyone going? I thought you were here to listen to my response to the scarnals. Anyway there's more air for us to breathe and that's all right. Thank you very much Alberto that was a really fantastic talk. One minute so you can... Those who have mistaken here. Okay I'm not quite sure how that happened but loads of people left and yet we still have a full lecture there so over to Subir. Thanks very much Alberto really excellent talk. I think some of you might who are taking courses in development studies found some things in common with what we've been talking about in the last two or three weeks. I basically want to have three different sets of points that I'd like to make. You can hear me in the back yes? Okay. Closer to the microphone. Okay. The first one is in a bizarre way I was actually kind of comforted to see that even the depictions of savages that you have have a human form in the sense that just barely 200 years before some of the documents that you showed if one looked at the Salter map or the Mapa Mundi these two famous maps of the 13th and 14th centuries the rest of the world was actually inhabited by monsters. You had people who had faces in their chests without a head whatsoever or you were depicted of other places outside of Europe where hybrids of people with dog heads and human bodies etc used to reside. So in a strange kind of way it almost appears to me that these depictions are on the verge of granting humanity to the savage which was not the case even a couple of hundred years before and to me that raises a certain set of questions which are along the following lines. Is the savage actually on a continuum from the monster to the human and secondly if that is the case then is savaging an active process. The construction of and the making of and the taming of and the prescription of things to be done to the savage seems to be on a particular kind of continuum and of course incipient in the text that you and in fact explicit in some of the text that you have shown there is the justification for slavery and for the formation of the state and the like. So that I think is an interesting one which is that in some ways the depiction of the savage and the writings about them are moments in time if you like of a longer historical process of converting monsters into human beings. The second element which is connected to that is that this if one was to look at a slightly different but newist text and I communicated with you earlier on that and I have in mind particularly the writings of theologians from the University of Salamanca in Portugal in the 16th century especially theologians such as Federico the Vittoria and they basically make an interesting argument which is that from the early 1500s they are thinking of the savage as human and in fact they want to take certain elements of what they believe to be universalistic elements of theological philosophy particularly that coming out of Thomas Aquinas to try and see if they can expand that to include those who live in these lands. So explicit writings on the application of just war theory to resistance and defensive mechanisms of savages which I think is a kind of universalising move. Second, the idea whether or not if someone was offered the chance to accept Christ as their Lord and Master in a language they did not recognize and then for them to be killed because they did not accept Christ there is a question regarding whether or not they have a life a right to life and I think that is also quite interesting that it is co-terminous with some of the writings which seem to be depicting them in ways that put them beyond the pale of universality and of an obstinate otherness which seems at this moment as being almost impossible to erase. So there is a very exaggerated otherness but at the same time there seems to be a desire to bring them within the domain of the universal and I think there is a nice tension there in this particular dimension. The second is that it is not just about the othering it seems to me but it is also about commonsensically creating a categorisation and hierarchisation of otherness. So you've got the lax that you mentioned and I sort of was reminded of Michael Aiders' book from 1989 which is Machines as the Measure of Man where he basically looks at how Europeans devised a classification of populations around the world based precisely on some of the lax that you have described and in particular the lax that are of interest in that classificatory scheme are whether or not they had the wheel whether they had writing and particularly in the later phase whether they had historical writing which obviously Hegel deals in his essay on world history. So that is interesting to me which is within the other is a further othering kind of a process and the savage seems to be one element on the spectrum of different other people. The third point I just want to make very briefly is that you know there's a Canadian theorist called John Beasley Murray who talks about the fact that a kind of a you know some of what you describe are the top philosophers of the time but there is a classification of writing which is what foot soldiers of the conquests carried with them and they also had this sort of and perhaps more cruel depictions of the other and the point of these writings was to constantly affirm to those who were engaged in brutalizing the other that the other needed to be brutalized that they were not possible it was not possible for them beyond the point to be persuaded to accept Christ and civilization and so that they should be brought to life. But as we know about Latin America particularly not so much America large scale mixing of the races happened and over a few hundred years obviously most of Latin America became mixed race of some sort or another. Particularly if you look at Mestizo populations within Mexico and in Central America so how do you sort of account for this massive difference and the production of it in these kinds of texts and real life encounters which on the one hand had that kind of brutal violence and genocidal violence but also resulted in intermingling and so on and on the question of intermingling I'll just make a last point which is that if you think of some of the attributes of the savage they are not entirely distinct from the attributes given to the poor within Europe and in particular if you think in terms of the lax which are being described here and poor and it's cognate words in a range of medieval usages across Europe also talks about dispossession they don't have this, they don't have that and so on. So there is already a template of otherness within Europe which is then exaggerated and projected outside of Europe and the lack element of that obviously is extremely interesting and important there and now the possibilities for there to be anything like a political association across these different racial and continental divisions is what Peter Leinbaw perhaps talks about in the multi-headed hydro where he looks at exactly these different classifications of people and in fact he refers explicitly to how the sort of Amerindian experiences for example people who might have worked on slave ships with Irish sailors or pirates or black people from Africa there is a possibility of having a different kind of political association which is not covered by Hobbes and it is not covered by any of the other political utopian or anti utopians who are talking about what next sort of scenario and it seems to me that the insistence on culture and civilization as that which divides Europe and the savage in some ways papers over that other possibility of the poor of Europe having some degree of solidarity with that of the colonized population so I just leave for you to think about and talk to us about that. That's great, thanks so much and I'll just try to be brief to what are questions that require anything but brevity to answer properly so first with the last point the question of the poor or indeed I think even of the peasantry if I'm not mistaken emerges explicitly in those theological debates in Salamanca that Victoria is involved in because partly what's being discussed is the whole question of natural slavery as a model through which to justify the potential enslavement of indigenous peoples in the Americas which interestingly is something that is being pushed by some of the conquistador and which in fact at a certain point the Spanish state not out of benevolence but just doesn't find to be particularly attractive because they actually want to produce populations in which they can draw tribute that case so in the discussion there's a sense of well you know since our you know part of the argument against natural slavery is to say well we don't treat our peasants as Aristotelian as we just treat them as inferior or worthy of command etc but not as anthropologically lacking in that quite extreme sense that natural slavery involves which according to Vittalia is not compatible with a kind of Christian sort of anthropology and there it's interesting that you do have that in the move from the idea of natural slavery to the position that Vittalia brings forward which is you know shouldn't be exactly represented as enlightened because it's a shift within Aristotle from the natural slave to the child so basically then the indigenous population is fully human but only potentially so this justifies command but doesn't and justifies even indenture but doesn't justify slavery ad infinitum because you know they are kind of ultimately human but I think those short circuits are also short circuits that fascinatingly follow in a more kind of popular cultural sense all the way into the 19th century so if you read something like Walter Benjamin's arcades project the narratives of Parisian class conflict are full of language of savages and then mappings onto these very stereotypical imaginaries of the Apaches and the Sioux and so on so that ends up being also a language through which European class and social conflicts get mapped in curious ways of course ways that totally occlude almost invariably the kind of solidarities identified by the likes of Reticur and Leimbau that you were talking about one of the things that talking about the philosophical history of the figure of the savage also occludes and partly because I was dealing mainly with text by Landucci and Pagdon rather than others there's a brilliant text by an Italian historian also from the 70s also a Marxist like Landucci was back then Giuliano Giozzi who writes this whole text about the role that Biblical narratives had in justifying title to lands in the Americas and one of the things that he shows is that something which is very difficult to make any sense out of which is basically the creation of all of these fantastic genealogies whereby the population of Peru were related to Norwegians all of these bizarre narratives which seem to be just the product of some surrealist principle within European colonialism or just a result of really technical legal debates which required the Spanish claim to be countered by others including the British or the Dutch or the Swedes or whatever by different languages of legitimacy which involved title which therefore involved using the languages of Biblical narratives of the flood all of these questions you know was there a new Adam did Christ somehow did Christ somehow preach the Gospel in the Americas before the arrival of the colonists because then these are heathens or perhaps they're also Jews all tons of writings about the potentially Jewish character of the Amerindian population all of this makes no sense unless you actually see the colonial relation as one that's also based on these forms of legal justification that also means that things that initially seem to be progressive can be anything but so for instance the some of the more brutally instrumental of the conquistadors were the ones who were arguing against the Spanish crown that the societies of the so-called savages were fully political societies and not some kind of lower barbarism because they were claiming that Montezuma had given them title and that he could only give them title legally if he had title to give which means that he had to be a sovereign which means that they had to be a properly constituted political society so this is also something that comes along with these narratives about about humanity and so on that's one of the ironies I think we take it for granted and understandably so that the recognition of humanity is a necessary condition for form emancipated if not egalitarian or tolerable relations it might be necessary but certainly not sufficient sometimes it serves the other quite contrary purpose as well in this case especially through this Aristotelian language of potentiality so somebody who's fully human but only potentially so justifies all sorts of extremely protracted forms of subjugation so Bithodia for instance calculated that you needed something like after having argued against natural slavery you needed something like 600 years for full abituation political society so we're still in that period and yes I think some of the main points that I wanted to raise I mean about the iconography that also is interesting because you could argue that the depth the depth of certain models which functioned as filters or screens through which to experience this reality including the visual vocabulary of classical painting and sculpture or Christian notions and Aristotelian notions of anthropology actually made in a sense overfamiliarizing counter and kind of stopped the figure of the monster and actually in some sense again make for the uncanny fact that the more brutal the more ontological forms of difference actually came later so it's actually after the likes of Montaigne or indeed even Hobbes etc that thinkers in the you know in the 17th century into the 18th started proposing again for these ideological reasons the whole theory of polygenesis that basically contrary to what all Christian thinkers had to think which was that there was only one source and that was Adam that actually there were different sources and races were different species that's a much later conception which is kind of ironic as we tend to think of the monster to equal as a kind of linear tale I guess Thank you very much to both of you for that discussion we now have about 25 minutes for questions so I would like to open it up to the floor if you just put your hand up for anyone who has questions please just put your hand up really obviously So in terms of like depicting the savage as a comparative notion of the European self does that still have any relevance in the kind of like modern discourse of you know third world populations or just any non-European populations Good evening Alberto Thank you very much for incredibly granular and a very sophisticated analysis Sorry can I just ask you to hold the microphone really close so we can hear thank you I just wanted to say thank you to Alberto for giving us a very granular and very sophisticated analysis I just want to apologise for the the exit of so many people that would never happen at my university My question is actually from the point of view of Australian legal history where a lot of analysis has been done on locky notions of agriculture and enclosure but no one has yet made this explicit link that you delineate the difference of hierarchies that hobs posits and that that lock does and I just wanted to ask you have you looked very closely at some of the early images of indigenous Australians that came to Europe because in that I think is another chapter of a book for you which may also bring the development studies people at SOAS up to date with the very cogent and incredibly sophisticated state apparatus that dispossesses indigenous people now You mentioned disagreements among the colonisers about enslaving the indigenous people disagreements about whether it is morally right, disagreements about whether it is economically sensible or beneficial to the colonisers and so on but in my understanding in addition to those arguments there was the problem that in general the indigenous people refused to be enslaved so I wonder how was that refracted through different versions of the savage Do you have your hand up? Yeah You seem to have your hand up I was wondering have you engaged much with Afropessimism because they have also done a kind of genealogy of looking how both the savage is constructed and the race and like a modern ontological current world that they kind of seems like predominant on the idea that there is an absence that can never be overcome through the way in which reality is structured you basically showed two types of negations or negative narratives one is idealistic so savage free of money etc and we don't need to bring shortcomings of our civilization and the other narrative where this and that and tryfulness and peace is absent and so on so which is actually legitimized colonialization chronologically how did they live together or one was dominant at one period time and then was changed by another and what happened? The negative and the more No no no I mean two negative two negative narrations one is more positive idealistic that well you showed the quotations there so and another it was like more negative that there is no rightfulness there is no peace there is no that and this and what happened to savage so these two accounts when savage was placed into historical and materialistic domain context I'm still having a little trouble identifying what you see as the two accounts because you're saying they're both negative but one is positive both negations but there is no this and that there is no money there is no shortcomings of our civilization the other one is no peace no like law no this and that and this why yeah and what happens to them when they enter into more yeah yeah yeah okay hi I would just like to know because what you've presented is a very is a version of the savage coming from a Eurocentric standpoint is there any narrative or in how the colonized saw the European so to speak did the colonized see them as savages as well and if so is there any similarities or differences so if we could perhaps answer this first round of questions and then we can go for another set after that I'll answer I won't answer them necessarily in order but just see how it works I'll answer the last one first because it's easier to keep in mind so there are sorry there are of course all sorts of different accounts that one can find that try either to reconstruct the encounter from the other side of course always via records you know somewhat like you know problems of subaltern studies history might reading in the gaps etc but not entirely because of course in the case of especially as far as my understanding goes especially in the case of the conquest and subjugation of the Inca Empire was very quickly in fact this goes back also to Sabir's point about the mixing partly because it was recognized as a hierarchical society with a priesthood an aristocracy, a form of government etc which both in the case actually of the Inca and the Aztec there was a co-optation of the elite class inter Spanish rule of quantity of personnel in short to the point that some Aztec cities were governed 100 years after conquest by non-Spanish of course in a subsidiary vassalage kind of situation so there were quite early on the names suddenly at present escaped me but there were writers who had been children of Inca an Inca aristocratic woman and a Spanish conquistador for instance who had direct linguistic and family and memory knowledge of what this meant for them they were often of course or not often they were all Christian converts and had to be in order to subsist in the situation but they could tell that story there's a really great book I think a fascinating book by a French historian called Nathan Bachtel who is translating to English the name now escapes me which is all about the experience of defeat including the way in which that then threads itself into festivals and holidays in Peru and in Mexico to this day where the experience even though the population is a mixed population it still celebrates or experiences that moment from the other side I found recently there's a really interesting huge interview called I think the falling sky which is with a a giant memoir done by an anthropologist called Bruce Albert with a shaman from the a Tupinamba shaman I think who Yanomami Yanomami sorry falling sky has a couple of chapters within the whole account that directly talk about the experience and the imagination and also the cosmological insertion of the white man within their own cosmology so it's not you know I think there are different accounts so it's not the situation where it's just some complete epistemological black hole where you only have access to things that you know your centric position had of course there are mediations this is narrated to and published through an anthropologist and it's not a direct account whatever that might be but still I think that that can be found in terms of well in terms of these accounts that I talked about I mean I think it is I mean Subir when he sent me some questions to what extent does this remain for instance not just within anthropological or developmental account but within Marxism itself and I think that's a very complicated question I mean Clastra who I was citing at the end who was a virulent anti-Marxist or at least was a virally anti the Marxist anthropologist of his time we could argue about whether he was that apt in his criticisms of Marx himself but nevertheless saw the figure the developmental translation of the of the savage as privation as a condition of possibility for any Marxist historical materialism I mean he says the quote I had towards the end he says this is why Marxism is a theory I didn't get to it but you know this is why Marxism is a theory of history founded on the tendency of the development of productive forces must give itself as a starting point a sort of degree zero of productive forces then he criticizes that by saying actually the notion that so-called savages had economies of scarcity is a nonsense and martial salons has proved otherwise etc etc but it's interesting in that form degree zero that there is the sense of the transcoding of of a lack in that regard though from the other side there's a quite interesting debate that Claude Libby Strauss has against Maxime Roddinson in structuralist anthropology where Roddinson criticizes for what he perceives as his anti-Marxism and Libby Strauss says actually you haven't read Marx properly because Marx actually thought that these dynamics of the contradiction of productive forces only happen in class societies with states and he quite explicitly and in some of the ethnological notebooks as well doesn't think that they necessarily pertain to so-called primitive societies which then basically leads Libby Strauss saying well there are different kinds of histories and not all of them take the form that a historical materialism of complex modes of production requires so disagreements amongst colonizers refusal of enslavement yeah I mean that's that of course I guess gets ideologically and polemically translated into the whole trope of the not just the trope of the refusal of work but then more disturbingly because one should also give a sense of the other peculiar contradictions here is that figures like Las Casas who try to defend the indigenous populations to an extent even still treating them as children or whatever against the more virulent subjugation by the conquistadors present them as too weak to work so present them in this kind of condescending form by saying well they can't be enslave because they're not constitutionally able to work in industrial work they're not made for that some you know because they're too noble or whatever the story is because they're like children or you know etc leading Las Casas to say maybe we should import black slaves you know so it's not you know so that those and that's where you know going to the kind of aphro pessimism question in a sense like there's all sorts of very complex issues as to the relationship between the imaginary of the savage and other imaginaries of alterity and race not least of course against black populations firstly as being elsewhere and then of course qua slaves in the same territory and that's I think a really trachetion now one of the things that that leads in some of these discourses is saying oh well there's a total disanalogy so you just have completely incomparable and detached forms of racialization so you have anti blackness as this thing which is completely of its own kind and then you have you know anti indigenous and and I'm not but that's a very long story I don't find that that position persuasive though it is definitely the case that there are very there are quite distinct histories and one of the things that all the historians know is that European philosophers were very you know different points not all of them but exhibited an interest anthropological and philosophical in indigenous population of the Americas that they never had for African civilizations about which they knew a lot more through many accounts and had known for longer so that demands different development and I haven't looked at those images but it's definitely something I'd be very keen to follow up on I mean it's I think the point about I think one of the issues about also the Lockean account and this also goes back to the point about what material were these were actual colonists working with so I think at different points it's tricky to trace which are the operative ideological which are the operative text and also which are the operative ideological frameworks so yes Lockeanism generally has massive influence but then you know who is operationalising you know is it a particular lawyer or a jurist or somebody you know it's not I think there's a risk that one can enter into including what I've been talking about to just interject in a quite a historical way that somehow there's this kind of Lockean or you know at other points Montesquieu or Adam Smithian effect on colonialism whilst I think then it becomes trickier and very interesting to follow well which text in which and through whom because obviously a lot of the people engaging in the in the activity of colonising and an empire are you know are not you know trying to be faithful to these philosophers and actually operating with all sorts of weird mediations that's why some of these texts for instance this Giuliano Giozzi text is very interesting to show how some of the weirdest most cracked and philosophically incomprehensible theories providing legitimate title including you know bizarre speculations about Atlantis or whatnot find their way into some verily significant colonial situations in ways that you know the a lot of the more philosophical treatments are just for are just for an internal European consumption I mean that's the other element a lot of the a lot of the figure of the savage including the case of Montaigne is a total internal trope it's a it's a figure of of it's a pseudo mirror or pseudo inversion that's used for an argument among men of letters to criticize the limits of their own civilization sometimes as a trope like in the Persian the other is a trope to criticize certain forms of Christianity or Catholicism or Protestantism that you couldn't criticize otherwise so I think we have to be quite you know nuanced in seeing how and and through what actual operations these things are really working so I think that says I think there was one question the very first question about modern discourses ah yes yes so that's I mean I guess that partly links to this the what I was trying to partly trying to suggest is a contrary to some of the historical arguments I say well you have this kind of caesora so you move from the formalistic negation to then a fine-grained positive account of ethnology or comparative anthropology et cetera still seems to me that including in the degree zero the plaster talks about an element of the negation is present now I think you know to the extent that the sedimentations of these Scottish enlightenment ideologies go very deep and you know there are still you know think tanks called you know the Adam Smith Institute or whatever that are happy to promulgate them then you know in some sense it goes now the interesting thing would be to think well what are the ways in which this plays out and you know one of the I mean one of the more obvious ones I guess I mean from a total amateur outsider standpoint about issues of development and whatnot but you know one of them which seems very obvious is the particular relationship that questions of property and land title have to imaginaries of social complexity you know individual emancipation and so on from schemes to give title to people in favelas to microcredit to what have you there is a very powerful notion that you cannot have a certain forms of subjectivity social relation pacification of behavior unless you first have certain forms of property you know certain property forms which can get quite specific you know whether it's the ability of a bank account or whether it's the ability to own property or to be able to rent or whatever and I think those mechanisms in some way do seem to bear some not insignificant formal analogies to not so much the Hobbes and Lawkinson but what comes after these discourses that make beginning with Montesquieu and then through the Scottish Enlightenment and make the link between ways of living understood through the link between subsistence and ownership and then from there build the question of laws and politics and human engagement and so that seems to me still I mean I'm happy to be contradicted but it seems to me still to be quite a powerful way of thinking it doesn't mean that it's mapping those ideologies or philosophies from late 18th century into the present but I think it's it's a kind of the notion of lack is very much especially from Latin American writers like Gisgubar or others who also use the term lack in terms of what development is supposed to fill and obviously these days you have essays floating around saying we did not colonize Africa for long enough we left too soon or failed state discourses or even the whole idea that democracy is a habit yeah it's a habit but also haven't built the habit yeah the 600 years did not elapse before we got decolonized out of Africa and had we been there for longer there would have been more like us and the world would be a better place this is such an interesting discussion however I do want to give the audience the chance to ask a few more questions before we finish so we can take we have time for a couple more if you want to put your hand up there's one there and then one over there I would like to know if you have followed in Brazil the development of the image of the good savage that developed in the 19th century and it was used, it was really important for Brazilian nationalism among especially in literature especially in literature the Brazil in the band after brazil independence and it was used as a way to construct the image of the reconstruct the image of the savage as a good savage of docile and to pacify them at the 19th and 20th century and another question that I would like to ask if this image of the savage that you constructed how does it relate to the older images of barbarians and before the colonisation of the Americans of the Americas first if I could talk my question is a little bit about and I missed some of the earlier questions so I hope I'm not repeating anything what the political responses should be of people who are defined as savages or as barbarians if we're assuming that we don't want to assimilate or integrate into the structures that are pressed and degrade and the main reason why this question is coming to me is from a book that I read over the summer called Declonial Judaism which very much looks at the sort of continuum between civilisation and barbarianism and basically talks about how one of the strategies of Jewish thinkers like Marx or Luxembourg and the Frankfurt School was a negative counter-narrative of barbarism whereby you say it's the people who are coming over here and committing genocide and ecocide who are the actual barbarians and then there's so the author then looks at changes in post holocaust Jewish 4 whereby there became a positive reappropriation of barbarism and people who said I think it's Isaac Deutsche who said I'm an incurable barbarian and they saw positively reappropriate barbarian and what it means to be a savage so I'm wondering how you fall along those sort of lines of a negative counter-narrative or a positive reappropriation of these discourses We have time for one more question if anyone has one more and we have these two very important ones So the starting with the last one again I mean I think the any you know any pejorative I mean it's a sort of issue of the politics of rhetoric in one sense that is somewhat general any pejorative description given particular conditions can be flipped in some sense or appropriated but you know those conditions are not always present and it might not always be why so yes you do have any the we barbarians or you know even one could even you know like some of the Brazilian avant-garde celebrate you know anthropology or cannibalism is a kind of you know is that sort of revivifying primitivist reference or indeed one can one can engage in saying yes the civilized of the real barbarians which I think is possibly a more common one because it functions in the mode of identifying a kind of hypocrisy this is already present in in Montaigne who talks already in the 1500s in a weird essay called of coaches which is literally about coaches but then starts denouncing colonialism in the most extreme senses of saying you know he talks about the millions passed or I mean it's just a claim to genocide made you know not so long after the beginning of the conquest so that that's possible now far be it for me to answer anything which involves should especially for other people but I do think it's I think it is interesting to see yeah I mean to see given the whole way of this of these apparatuses of you know negating people's political existence placing them that degree zero and so on and so forth what exactly are forms of collective political subjectivity that that various forms of indigenous movement have and they obviously vary a lot and some might involve forms of identification that are across ethnic or group differences and some might be very much claims of sovereignty based by a very particular group in a very particular situations you can see yeah I mean you I think you can only answer those issues as they are issues of strategy and rhetoric and reflection that people engage in on a quiterion basis politically that I think also differ very much in terms of what is the what is the apparatus of the state that they are responding to I mean it is interesting in this I mean I think that there was that question about the you know the Afro-Pessimism thing before I mean one of the interesting things that I think makes it superficially seemed that these are very different discourses is that of course the nature I mean especially North America and especially in the United States the nature of the history of slavery is such that it doesn't necessarily involve or hasn't for a long time since the 1930s mainly involve claims for territorial sovereignty and it seems to have it seems to make claims about black identity and black power that are not you know that are not ingrained or granular or group specific in the same way that one might encounter in indigenous people that still differentiate themselves very much from other indigenous people in the same broad speaking kind of states but I think it is a very interesting point I mean regarding the you know the question of I mean I know very distantly about the history of these issues in Brazil I guess two things come yet I mean one thing that comes to mind which I guess isn't even more disturbing history is a particular way in which at least in the United States case the whole settler colonial imaginary is both is both genocidal and appropriative because it actually then tries to infuse the imaginary and the subjectivity of the settler with aspects of what they have romanticized as the so-called savage or the Indian or etc and that's really that whole thing that happens for instance you can find in this grotesque 19th century US paintings where you see the heroic figures of the savage as the heroic figure which is in no way a critique of the very process that led to their dispossession and murder and so on so I think that's also very very peculiar the way the savage in particular actually because this is something which is quite specific which of course doesn't have the same role in terms of the slave or the cwly or tons of other figures of subjection there's something about the history of the savage as an ideological and it somehow allows for this very sinister paradoxical operation which is to symbolize as well as to give some kind of exalted role whilst in no way criticizing continued subjugation and dispossession. I don't exactly know how to analyze or get to that but I do think it's a really striking phenomenon that might say something about the difference between that and figures of also older figures like the barbarian or whatever. I can just briefly say you can look at British paintings from the same time and you'll probably see very similar representations like the colonies bearing Britannia taking gifts from the colonies is a big painting and you've got savages black people helping Britannia as she takes the fruit and the gold and the wheat coming from around the world. That just reminded me when I was working on that book on fanaticism this only came to mind now but I was really striking to find in these letters written by soldiers and administrators on the so-called colonial frontier places I would not be I guess like Waziristan and so on. This their whole figure of the fanatic being also this figure you know he's both the enemy to be vanquished but he's also weirdly the repository of all of these bizarre you know eroticized martial imagine you know they're you know they're heroic you know we have to kill them all but you know they're great fighters blah blah blah so there's also that image you know in this other context which is quite which is quite potent and somehow serves also to legitimize the very activity of warring and indeed of extermination as a kind of classical conflict between honorable soldiers rather than you know even if to the death rather than an administrative militarized land grab so I think that might be you know one to kind of except for thank you for sticking it out. Yes so I think we've got to the end now just leaves me to thank Alberto hugely for a really interesting talk and thank you Severe as well.