I’d like to linger on the following sentence from Aníbal Quijano’s “Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America”: “After the colonization of America and the expansion of European colonialism to the rest of the world, the subsequent constitution of Europe as a new id-entity needed the elaboration of a Eurocentric perspective of power” (183). Thinking through this id-entity, then: Europe constitutes the id—the Freudian understanding of unconscious drives and instinctual forces—of coloniality. European coloniality is its own personality, its own agential entity governed by the “natural” and “given” laws of the id. And what does that look like?
Mbembe might say it is underwritten by the necropolitical—the id cathected towards death—characterized by the bureaucratic instrumentalization of “splintering” (territorial fragmentation and compartmentalization), vertical sovereignty, and infrastructural warfare as both a means and ends of the administration of death in modern sovereignty (27).
What I find useful in an understanding of modern (and contemporary neo-) coloniality’s necropolitical id-entity is the potential activation of a resistant political sense; that is, the becoming awareness of the gaps and cracks of the id-entity, disrupting both notions of a “national” id and coherent sovereign entity in the administration of life and (social) death of coloniality.
Silvia Rivera Cuisicanqui writes about the syncretic formation of a relational and dialogic Andean-Catholic religiosity which conflates the iconography and practice of each, signaling indigenous resistance to social, religious, historical, and bodily death: “In this entire trajectory, a new space of contestation and symbolic resistance has been reconstituted: a heterodox form that is inscribed in the language, in the bodies, and in the commercial circuits, which we have named takiy-thaki.” In this moment of resistance, coloniality’s necropolitical Eurocentric id-entity fragments and collects around Andean life. I wonder, then: what is the potential for these heterodoxic pockets of ambiguity to produce life outside the necropolitical? Is such a situation possible within coloniality?
Rivera Cusicanqui, Silvia. "The Potosí Principle: Another View of Totality." Decolonial Gesture 11. no. 1: 2014. Accessed 29 Sep 2018. Quijano, Aníbal. "Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America" Coloniality at Large: Latin America and the Postcolonial Debate. 181-222. Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2008. Mbembe, Achille. "Necropolitics." Public Culture 15. no. 1: 2003. Accessed 29 Sep 2018.