Issues

Oficina nº 458

Oficina nº 458

What Is “Indigenous”? — Or “A Silence Made of Many Doors”

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Authors
Publication date
January, 2021
Abstract
Starting from the concepts of violence of language and blindness in language, as Jean-Jacques Lecercle and Arthur Rimbaud, respectively, discussed them, this text aims at debating the meaning of “indigenous” and its implications. That word seems to point to the negation of reciprocities between the ones who discover and the ones who have been “discovered” and seems to relate to what Boaventura de Sousa Santos called the “abyssal thinking” of western modernity. In this vein, I discuss the role of art and poetry as forms of resistance to a vast net of denied reciprocities and as possibilities for the inauguration of new forms of thinking and of language that might go beyond the abyss — in a projective creation, as Charles Olson proposed. This way, art and poetry would point to an ecology of knowledges.
Keywords
indigenous, poetry, violence of language, blindness, abyssal thinking, projective poetics, ecology of knowledges