Life Is Not Useful E-Book

Ailton Krenak

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Seitenzahl: 99

Beschreibung

Indigenous leader and activist Ailton Krenak reminds us that we must awaken from the comatose senselessness we have been immersed in since the beginning of the modern colonial project, where order, progress, development, consumerism, and capitalism have taken over our entire existence, leaving us only very partially alive, and, in fact, almost dead. To awaken from the coma of modernity is, for Krenak, to awaken to the possibility of becoming attuned to "the cosmic sense of life." He points out that the COVID-19 pandemic affects all so-called "human" lives and that the time is ripe for us all to reflect on and undo the exclusivity and distinction that have characterized the concept of humanity throughout Western modernity.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Cover

Series Title

Title Page

Copyright Page

About the Author

About this Book

Acknowledgments

Introduction – Natalia Brizuela

The cosmic sense of life

Awakening

Listening with the collective-constellation

Notes

You Can’t Eat Money

Notes

Dreams to Postpone the End of the World

Notes

The Thing-Making Machine

Notes

Tomorrow is Not for Sale

Notes

Life is Not Useful

Notes

References

Books and articles

Poems and songs

Film and video

End User License Agreement

Guide

Cover

Table of Contents

Begin Reading

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Series Title

Critical South

The publication of this series is supported by the International Consortium of Critical Theory Programs funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Series editors: Natalia Brizuela, Victoria Collis-Buthelezi, and Leticia Sabsay

Leonor Arfuch,

Memory and Autobiography

Paula Biglieri and Luciana Cadahia,

Seven Essays on Populism

Aimé Césaire,

Resolutely Black

Bolívar Echeverría,

Modernity and “Whiteness”

Diego Falconí Trávez,

From Ashes to Text

Celso Furtado,

The Myth of Economic Development

Eduardo Grüner,

The Haitian Revolution

Ailton Krenak,

Life is Not Useful

Premesh Lalu,

Undoing Apartheid

Karima Lazali,

Colonia Trauma

María Pia López,

Not One Less

Achille Mbembe and Felwine Sarr,

The Politics of Time

Achille Mbembe and Felwine Sarr,

To Write the Africa World

Valentin Y. Mudimbe,

The Scent of the Father

Pablo Oyarzun,

Doing Justice

Néstor Perlongher,

Plebeian Prose

Bento Prado Jr.,

Error, Illusion, Madness

Nelly Richard,

Eruptions of Memory

Suely Rolnik,

Spheres of Insurrection

Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui,

Ch’ixinakax utxiwa

Tendayi Sithole,

The Black Register

Maboula Soumahoro,

Black is the Journey, Africana the Name

Dénètem Touam Bona

, Fugitive, Where Are You Running?

Life is Not Useful

Ailton Krenak

Translated by Jamille Pinheiro Dias and Alex Brostoff

polity

Copyright Page

First published in Portuguese as A vida não é útil © 2020, Ailton Krenak

Published in Brazil by Companhia das Letras, São Paulo International Rights Management: Susanna Lea Associates

This English edition © Polity Press, 2023

Polity Press

65 Bridge Street

Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK

Polity Press

111 River Street

Hoboken, NJ 07030, USA

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-5404-1- hardback

ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-5405-8- paperback

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NL

The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.

Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.

For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com

About the Author

Ailton Krenak was born in 1953 in the Doce River valley region, a territory of the Krenak people and a place whose ecology has been severely impacted by mining. An activist in the socio-environmental movement and in defense of Indigenous rights, he organized the Aliança dos Povos da Floresta (Alliance of Forest Peoples), which unites riverine and Indigenous communities in the Amazon. He is one of the most prominent leaders of the movement that emerged from the Indigenous Awakening in the 1970s in Brazil, and he also contributed to the creation of the Union of Indigenous Nations (UNI). He has done extensive educational and environmental work as a journalist and in video and television programs. His struggles in the 1970s and 1980s were decisive for the inclusion of the chapter on Indigenous rights in the 1988 Brazilian Constitution, which guaranteed Indigenous rights to ancestral homelands and culture, at least on paper. He is the co-author of the UNESCO proposal that created the Serra do Espinhaço Biosphere Reserve in 2005 and is a member of its managing committee. He was awarded the Order of Cultural Merit of the Presidency of the Republic in 2008, he received an honorary doctorate from the Federal University of Juiz de Fora in Minas Gerais in 2016, and in 2022 he was a recipient of the Prince Claus Impact Award. He is also the author of Ideas to Postpone the End of the World (House of Anansi Press, 2020).

About this Book

“You Can’t Eat Money” is based on a live-streamed conversation between Ailton Krenak and Leandro Demori for The Intercept Brasil on April 8, 2020; a lecture Krenak gave at the event Plante Rio, at Fundição Progresso in Rio de Janeiro, November 2017; and an interview with Amanda Massuela and Bruno Weis called “O tradutor do pensamento mágico,” Cult, November 4, 2019.

“Dreams to Postpone the End of the World” is based on a live-streamed conversation between Ailton Krenak and Sidarta Ribeiro at the Festival Na Janela, by Companhia das Letras, on May 24, 2020, and the above-mentioned interview with Amanda Massuela and Bruno Weis, “O tradutor do pensamento mágico.”

“The Thing-Making Machine” is based on a live-streamed conversation between Ailton Krenak and Marcelo Gleiser at the Conversa Selvagem, on April 17, 2020; an interview with Fernanda Santana called “‘Vida sustentável é vaidade pessoal,’ diz Ailton Krenak,” Correio, January 25, 2020; a live-streamed conversation between Emicida and Ailton Krenak for the GNT channel during Environment Week on June 6, 2020; and a live-stream with Jornalistas Livres on June 9, 2020.

“Tomorrow is Not for Sale” is drawn from three interviews with Ailton Krenak, carried out in April 2020: Bertha Maakaroun’s “O modo de funcionamento da humanidade entrou em crise,” Estado de Minas, April 3, 2020; William Helal Filho’s “Voltar ao normal seria como se converter ao negacionismo e aceitar que a Terra é plana,” O Globo, April 6, 2020; and Christiana Martins’s “Não sou um pregador do apocalipse. Contra essa pandemia é preciso ter cuidado e depois coragem,” Expresso, Lisbon, April 7, 2020. This chapter was published as an e-book by Companhia das Letras in April 2020.

“Life is Not Useful” is based on the conversation “Como adiar o fim do mundo,” O Lugar, March 18, 2020; a live-stream with Jornalistas Livres on June 9 2020; and the above-mentioned interview with Fernanda Santana, “‘Vida sustentável é vaidade pessoal,’ diz Ailton Krenak.”

Acknowledgments

I am especially grateful to Rita Carelli, who was fundamental to making this book happen, and to Izabel Stewart, for supporting my work and research.

IntroductionNatalia Brizuela

The cosmic sense of life

This phrase condenses one of the many currents in which Ailton Krenak’s work has been immersed, deeply, since he was a child in the 1950s, living with his family, and in the public sphere since the 1970s. His interventions, collected in this and numerous other books, essays, and recorded lectures and conversations, remind readers and audiences that the Earth is a living organism, and that humans are but one minuscule element of it. Ailton1 also reminds us humans that we must awaken from the comatose senselessness we have been submerged in since the beginning of the modern colonial project, where order, progress, development, consumerism, and capitalism have taken over our entire existence, leaving us only very partially alive, and in fact almost dead. To awaken from the coma of modernity is, for Ailton, to awaken to the possibility of becoming once more connected to the cosmic sense of life. Through the modern Western project, we have butchered the Earth, “torn it apart,” laid it to waste, and with it ourselves. Regaining a cosmic sense of life is remembering that “[l]ife moves through everything” – rocks, mountains, rivers, plants, animals, insects, ancestors – and that it is “crossing the planet’s living organism on an immaterial scale.” Life is not about what we are able to plan and organize on a calendar, it is not about working enough to be able to rest, it is not about becoming a fulfilled individual with a certified education and a large salary. “Life is transcendence” (p. 14). And because it is transcendence, it cannot be made “useful” within the utilitarian logic of the colonial habitation of the planet. Life, as Ailton states in a 1989 interview, is “assuring the preservation of the universe of relations.”2 Life, for him, is sustaining the connective tissue between visible and invisible beings in this cosmos.

This is why Ailton’s questioning of what constitutes humanity is central to this book, from the first phrase of the first essay, “You Can’t Eat Money.” In this essay as well as the others in this book, based on interviews and conversations that took place primarily during the first months of the COVID-19 pandemic, Ailton emphatically points out that the pandemic affects all so-called “human” lives and that the time is ripe for us all to reflect on and undo the exclusivity and distinctions that have characterized the concept of humanity throughout Western modernity, whereby some humans are part of the “caste” and others are considered “sub-humans” (Indigenous, Black people): “Perhaps the very idea of humanity, this totality we have learned to call humanity, will dissolve with the events that we are currently experiencing” (p. 4). The idea of humanity, as Ailton insists throughout the book, is only an “illusion” disguising the accumulation of power and money by some. Ailton offers, in these and numerous other essays and lectures from the last thirty years, a harsh critique of the forms of division, separation, and rupture – between humans and “sub-humans,” between humans and non-humans, between humans and so-called “nature,” between so-called “humanity” and the Earth – that constitute the DNA of progress, modernity, and capitalism. Humanity has tried to destroy the cosmic sense of life, but many, particularly those labeled “sub-human,” have been actively keeping the cosmic sense alive against all odds given the ongoing genocidal attacks they have suffered on their life forms and practices since the dawn of the colonial project. The development of the “club of humanity” (p. 1) throughout the long modern project is figured by Ailton as the severance of our entanglement with the Earth and with life.