Phagology and schismogenesis

Abstract

Motivated by a postulation presented by Eduardo Viveiros de Castro in his preface to Beatriz Azevedo’s book Antropofagia – Palimpsesto Selvagem, the notion of “phagology” aims to make up for the lack of an adequate concept, in the conceptual economy of my doctoral thesis, The Anti-Orpheus: towards an spherology from the point of view of the spectral, to designate and scale different relationship schemes between ontologies and to organize some conceptual pairs branching out from the nuclear relationship “ego–other”, both affected by an intrinsically perspectivist dynamic within themselves and between each other. In this article, considering the possible relevance of the concept for related research, I intend to: (1) present the main components of the concept, organized around the pairs lógos–phágos (modes of relationship with otherness) and logical topology–phagical topology (topological planes); (2) unfold its application in two symmetrically opposed ideal types (“immunology” and “anthropophagy”); and (3) articulate, in the double form of a diagnosis–prognosis, the way in which these ideal types relate to each other, at the intersection between the concept of phagology and Gregory Bateson’s concept of “schismogenesis”, reshaped by authors such as Viveiros de Castro, David Graeber, David Wengrow, Michael Houseman, and Carlo Severi.