The Death of the White Man and Slave Quarter's power: Translation in Times of New Ontology

Abstract

Badiou, in Being and Event, assumes that the void is formed by inconsistent multiplicities. This view precludes the conception of a closed unit. We believe that such a formulation proves to be an important philosophical corollary to formulations being made in anthropology. Roy Wagner, in his book An Anthropology of the Subject, will formulate the idea of the holographic subject, underlining the impossibility of distinguishing between formulation and experience. Marilyn Strathern, with her discussion about scales, in her book Partial connections, goes in the same direction. We can think of the departure from the unitary model of subject as caused as much by the enormous process of translation into the dominant language that happened thanks to globalization, as by the study of narratives from other cultures, with other models of subject, as in the studies cited above and other efforts. of anthropology. Unlike an institutional integration, this kind of translational encounter is leading to a series of tensions that makes Viveiros de Castro’s formula, multinaturalism, a central reflection: we live not only in different cultures, but in different worlds.