Ten Notes on Primitive Imperial Accumulation

It seems necessary to go beyond traditional understandings of Spanish imperial reason as a mere ideological cover for the extraction of precious minerals or, alternatively, as the territorial extension of national Catholic unification on the model of the Inquisition - or both. A critique of imperial reason must proceed through the thinking of its unthinkable history in the early times of the Spanish Conquest of the New World: when terror, and not hegemony, still prevailed absolutely. The surplus of enjoyment upon which Spanish terror came to be known as the precondition of law in the land constitutes imperial reason at the same time as it deconstitutes it. But it is only because its constitution cannot be thought without its deconstitution that imperial reason must posit the unthinkability of a primitive imperial accumulation as its very condition of possibility. Hegemony processes in the New World, thought from imperial reason, will show themselves to be a modality of relationship with primitive imperial accumulation. They are the way in which imperial reason survived itself historically by presenting itself as always already its own critique. If Ginés de Sepúlveda, Las Casas, or Fernández de Oviedo can be thought to be organic thinkers of the Spanish Empire, it is because they let us raise the question of the original terror upon which hegemonic reason functions. The violence of empire can then be thought anew. But the problem remains whether a focus on parahegemony today can be historically conceptualized as an epochal breakthrough that would restitute critical thinking to a non-imperial destiny. Keywords: Colonial Latin American LiteratureImperial ReasonPrimitive Accumulation

Biology · Botany · Fern · Early Modern Spanish Literature · Latin American history and culture · Spanish Literature and Culture Studies

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