The ‘Human’ is understood as a substance, a fundamental category and idea of being that asserts an essence prior to existence, for to be Human is to be endowed with the categories and scripts of ‘Man’ latent within Christian, Platonic, and Positivist thought. Taking the ‘Human’ as a pronoun, it instead becomes a pragmatic function of tendency towards a certain locution of being that is not rigidly delimited. If, within Amerindian indigenous perspectivist frameworks, “primitive people’s celebrated designations” of humanity is “less as substantives than as pronouns marking the subjective position of the speaker”, then in what way can the Western concept of ‘Human’ be understood as an assumed identity; an inheritance of scripts and modes of being that conform to the ‘image of God’ as construction rather than essence (de Castro, 59)? To conform to the ‘image of God’ – a fixed transcendental ideal that exists through the death of the becoming-other of the self, enforcing sameness – is to conform to an ideated archetype of what Being ought to be. Therefore, perspectivism deconstructs the ‘Human’ as a naturalized/essential category, revealing instead our semiotic cathexis – in the Lacanian sense – into an unconsciously assumed modality of behavioral scripting.

Such a cathexis opens questions as to whether our investment in the idea of the ‘Human’ or ‘Human as category’ persists because our attachment to it constructs the ontological Real of our shared modern existence, and whether/how the deconstruction of ‘Human’ – and the structural trauma (individual healing) it engenders – can serve as a viable praxis for the decolonization and pluralization of the modern episteme. By virtue of our cathexis into the signifier ‘Human’, we project an idealized image of the self – de Castro’s ‘Same’ – and in its rupture, we confront the trauma of destabilization, the psychic rupture from the epistemological Real that structures modern existence. The question arises, that as modernity has been typified as the ‘loss of the Creature’, are we now equipped in the present to survive the ‘loss of the Human’ as its/our structural fiction? Do we structure ourselves around a new categorical subject or would our epistemic foundation be irreparably dismantled? What is it to imagine a world beyond the logic of the ‘Human’?

Inspired by Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s Cannibal Metaphysics, I introduce the notion of the Onto-Prononymic as an extension Amerindian perspectivism through the use case of pronouns and relational terms. Onto-prononymic thought understands identity through the way in which a term (such as ‘Human’ or even one’s own name) functions as a pronoun, asserting modalities of being/ontology that are necessarily unstable, ambiguous, and unreductive. That, through reference to external relations – the gaze of the other – and absolutely interior relations – the gaze of the self –, one’s being-a-term is a contextually emergent relation designation that is not delimited in absolute terms. Therefore, the other’s being-a-term (such as an animal’s being-human as de Castro points toward) is not delimited by the positivism that inheres within a term such as ‘Human’. That is to say, the pronoun does not have a stable, objective definition. In the perspectivism of the Onto-Prononymic, the ‘Human’ is not an a priori ontological fact, but rather a relationally onto-epistemicized a posteriori degree of accordance to personhood — “a center of intentionality constituted by a difference of internal potential — [that] is anterior and logically superior to the concept of the human” (de Castro, 58). In succinct terms, the ‘Human’ emerges post ‘Person’ in the indigenous perspectival framework, and the ‘Person’ emerges post ‘Human’ in the European/modern framework. In the former, the semiotic ambiguity of ‘Human’ entails also an ontological ambiguity, and in the latter, the semiotic fixity (and priority) of ‘Human’ entails ontological fixity.

My introduction of the Onto-Prononymic extends de Castro’s perspectivism into the present moment, enabling these ideas to transversally encounter each other and formulate a creative line of flight that gestures towards the possibility of new ontological and epistemological territories.

My analysis so far has been only comparative. Returning to the question of the structural fiction of the ‘Human’, I intend to consider how these philosophical positionings or ontological paradigms may encounter each other through transversal synthesis. To begin, I might ask what it means to be ‘Human’. Surely, to be ‘Human’ under our common understanding is to be a particular kind of physical being, enumerated by various physical laws and tendencies; this positivism, however, does not dialogue. Positivism’s incessant reductionism – its fossilization of subjects into objects – manifests the death instinct of the West, its essential nihilism. As according to the Amerindian episteme, however, de Castro emphasizes that “one must know how to personify, because one must personify in order to know” thereby indicating that ‘Human’ is a subjectivatory process requiring the personification of the ‘Human’ (de Castro, 62). In this sense ‘Human’ is not a fixed category, but instead a contextually emergent relational activity (the activity of personifying) that resists stasis. As we encounter a rapidly shifting political landscape intent on altering the episteme of modernity via a violent reduction of the multiplicitous – e.g. the agenda of onto-epistemicide of trans and queer+ lifeworlds in America and their erasure from legal/government discourse –, we find that personification, voice, and the processes of subjectivation as interrelational dialogue between self and world are silenced and disempowered.

I provoke, however, by asking whether resistance to the epistemicidal impulse of these resurgent fascisms is wasted insofar as those who are of such neglected lifeworlds, and allies of those of such neglected lifeworlds, continue to aspire to obtain recognition within the domain and categorical logic of the oppressor. Here, I mean to say that resistance should not be about seeking recognition within the hegemonic domain, but in disrupting the ontological framework that necessitates recognition itself. Rather than seeking recognition within oppressive ontologies, resistance might take the form of refusal – the radical reorientation of selfhood through perspectival pronounicity, an affirmation of relational, epistemological, and ontological ambiguity that resists capture through an alternative logic of recognition. In the ambiguity and refusal which inheres in this alternative logic, the person exists as a fluid becoming, unrestricted by the nihilistic didactic held within the framework of modern knowledge/knowing that perpetuates the anxiety of static being-hood as a negation of the fluidity of subjectivation and change. To refuse recognition is not to disappear, but to unmake the epistemic conditions that demand legibility under power.

This praxis of refusal becomes all the more urgent in the face of contemporary onto-epistemicides mentioned above: legal structures that erase trans and queer+ lifeworlds, and the concomitant biopolitical regimes that enforce rigid ontologies of the human. Extended further, our continued cathexis – whether habitual or deliberate – into the hegemonic semiotic regime as collective polity fortifies the structures of oppression, subjugation, and violence that define our contemporary moment. By retaining our constructed logics of absolute disjunction – between nations, ethnicities, and self and world – action is necessarily oriented towards the exploitative, the venal, and the predatory. This is the Cartesian cogito become demon itself¹; a module of absolute disjunction that isolates and alienates self from world. I remind us, however, that this is a constructed semiotic module that (r)ejects us from the Real. Thus, transversal encounter does not remain in the abstract; it is lived through the fractures of objectivation in real and intimate ways—at the level of personal-collective experiences, memories, bodies, and temporalities.

In the realm of personal experiences, memories, bodies, and temporalities, this process of subjectivation deterritorializes an isolated self that exists essentially solipsistically in all possible registers. Rather, perspectival pronoun-icity opens a sense of absolute possibility. It subverts the regime of ethico-aesthetic disconnection that confines being. That is to say, situated within the particular existential territory of a universalized (monological) consciousness, the conditions of legibility under the symbolically mediated — therefore alienated — Real dismantles the possible enunciations of what is existentially possible. Guattari emphasizes in his Three Ecologies that the narratological impulse of humanity is “the very support of existence” itself, indicating that the organizing principles of human self-reflexivity are overdetermined through intra-reinforcing semiotic schemes of enunciation (Guattari, 38). Guattari continues that “just as Greek theatre and courtly love or chivalric romance were once adopted as models or rather as modules of subjectification, so, today it is Freudianism which continues to underwrite our perception of sexuality, childhood, neurosis, etc.” (ibid). That is, at least, insofar as one remains situated within the familiar territory of Freudianism (or our assembled modern territory, captured by Capital) instead of outright refusing to engage.²

In the realm of collective experiences, memories, bodies, and temporalities, the process of subjectivation unearths an ethical positionality that privileges the recognition of shared immanency. That is to say, the recognition of the Other’s being co-constitutive with the Self; the absolute relation of co-creation that makes us responsible for our actions. This is nothing other than the absolute dissolution of the individual as alienated and isolated, immersing them in the Real of relational beinghood. Taking temporality into account, its territorial fracture positions the ‘Human’ as a temporally extended being that is the relational link between the past and the future. My generation contends with this fracture as we, “for the first time enter into deep time, planetary time” in response to the climate crisis (Hamilton, 117). By thinking beyond our time, our temporal territory becomes one that is timeless, upon which action is guided by an ethics of custodianship and care that extends prior to our becoming and past our perceived being-nothing.

In both realms/registers, we face a set of scripts that situate us into our modern territory that is none other than a territory of capture by Capital.

Facing such intimacy with Capital’s regime of capture and manipulation, the above provocation to refuse recognition as the unmaking of the epistemic conditions that demand legibility under power becomes doubly precarious as one not only refuses recognition externally, but refuses recognition internally. That is to say, the psychic regime of Capital is an operational territory upon which the constructed self feels a sense of familiarity and homeliness. To disband with this is to dismantle and to displace the self – a consistent experience of diasporic cultures such as the Sikhs or the original Greek philosophers. The tension such an endeavour produces is one of willing deterritorialization, the unmaking and remaking of the self through processual individuations that engage with the world-self apparatus transversally. That is to say, non-linearly and outside the purview of Hegelian History. This transversal engagement between the world-self apparatus enables a movement into sites of onto-epistemic residence that alter the very nature of our relation to existence, shining a light through the diaphanous material of the Self as a unidimensional site of existential capture, that can then envisage a polysemic multidimensional existential reality. The operation, foremostly, requires the making transparent of the Self/Ego so that it can release, or let possibility filter through its membrane as something permeable. Via the making permeable of the impermeable, refusal becomes possible.

It is this very polysemicity, multidimensionality, and perspectival pronounicity that enables rupture, deterritorialization and reterritorialization, and refusal. The outcome: the production of alterity that escapes the various traps, confines, boundaries, and limits of what is known or possible under the Modern Knowledge System – a congealed pedagogic architecture that cows to secular-capitalist logics of domain restriction.

This provocation does not attempt to presume itself as something decisive. It is by nature limited both in approach and scope. As a philosophical inquiry, I refrain from an analytic approach for something more poetic. While providing a framework for resistance, it does not account for the lived realities of economic, historical, or class based foundations of violence, thereby making precarious a discussion on deterritorialization and refusal for those who are in contestation with material forces of oppression. The lived realities of oppression are unlikely to be helped in any substantive way on account of the theoretical framework and possibilities I present in this article. Erasure is happening. Both of bodies and minds. On that account, I extend to the contemporary moment as a pedagogical move that showcases the effects of our contemporary territory. I encourage us to extend the temporal dimensions of our existence, with the hope that the reterritorialization of a potential future manifests a world healed from the traumas of today. For the aims of this provocation, it is my hope to have enabled an encounter between concepts that urges us to find lines of flight of our own. Despite these limits, rupture becomes a threshold through which alterity is potentiated. What follows is theory as encounter – that which is lived, embodied, and carried through the Real.

A-signfying Points of Rupture

Rooted squarely within our homely territories and comforting refrains of habitual action and recursive thought, the grasping of a-signifying points of rupture – those moments of semiotic (r)ejection – dislocate and therefore realize the subject within the unmediated Real. In my own encounter with the dialectical tension between semiotic mediation and the Real, my late father had visited me in my dreams. In each instance of his appearance, I have been continually oppressed by the onto-epistemic hegemony of European ratiocination, such that my father’s appearance, to that ratiocinative substratum of Self that commands (dominates) dominion over the whole of the Self (the Self as a pre-differentiated-individuating paradox), an incommensurable contradiction arose with the (un)reality of his becoming nothing. For his having been, to that ‘I’ who dwells in time, necessitates his becoming not — a being whose being is sundered from Being. And in his Appearing to this unitary and particularized sphere or universe of existence/experience named ‘I’, the Appearance was rejected. Consciousness had conspired to bring together a connection, to align the ‘I’ with the ancestor, the son with the father, and it is the very structures of European ratiocination, the structure of the Hegelian dialectic, that had severed connection, that had forced the particularized personality that wades through the marsh of conscious experience to forsake, to question, to doubt, to – in waves of fear, agitation, and confusion – imagine the Appearance of the father as the manifestation of the Deus deceptor, Descartes’ evil demon, resorting to the defensive immanency of the cogito and its dictatorial necessities – I am therefore you are not.

And yet, as my father spoke to me, as I dialogued with him, he shattered this dialectical oppression, for, as we walked, and as I questioned his existence, reminding him of the material conditions of his venture into nothingness – those processes of exsanguination and incineration – he very simply stated in plain and clear affirmation/refutation “Yes, but I am here all the same, Sukhi.”³

The process detailed above is one of objectification-subjectivation; a movement from the proposition of an absolute disjunction between knower and known towards a constantly individuating – never self-same – conjunct-disjunct of knower and known that implicates both as relationally agentive. That, instead of a dialectical relation of necessary opposites, there arises a dialogical relationship of mutually revealing relations. Within this dream encounter, the dialectical relation position encapsulated my operational modality, that, when ruptured by the making-dialogical of the dialectical, divested the hegemony of my homely semiotic territory, therefore making possible an altogether alterior⁴ territory that accepted the unmediated Real of pure experience. Simply, it was not I who had agency, but agency itself that washed over me; a recognition of the Real as that which houses the I, and not the I the Real. Through this rupture, the I becomes a double locality; the site of experiential consumption and the very thing which consumes itself.

The above indicates that such points of rupture are concomitant with ruptures in everyday standard consciousness. In other words, concomitant with ruptures in our homely existential territory. After encountering rupture, we are then prompted to engage in some kind of contemplative or interpretive practice that integrates and extends the rupture thereby forming an extended horizon of epistemic possibility. Drawing on Derrida’s eulogy for Roland Barthes, rupture produces the possibility for metonymic extension, or the drive to signify an incomprehensible whole through the particularities of language. The metonymy of the punctum is that point of heterogeneous singularity that resides “outside all fields and codes”, therefore also necessitating that we create new fields and new codes that see to a closer, alterior representation of the absolutely other Instance-in-Time (Derrida, 57). As the instance of metonymic induction, the punctum is “its power, potentiality, virtuality, and even its dissimulation, its latency”, or in other words, the point of departure for the induction of epistemic expansion (ibid).

Continually, altered states of consciousness are functional modules for deterritorializing consciousness/the self and thus a tool for creative resistance and refusal. Everyday standard consciousness might be characterized as our typical operative modality where the self is the center of existence in opposition to the world and always positioned agentively towards the world i.e. as an independent and sovereign actor that is for-itself and in-itself. Altered states of consciousness, I posit, encapsulate any kind of phenomenological context that primes the subject to flee from normative thought. In the case of my dream, its becoming lucid primed an acute possibility of flight. In the Sikh philosophico-spiritual tradition, the practice of nām simran as mnemic technology for ego death aligns the self with universal imperatives, or hukam. In modern psycho-therapeutic practice the utilization of psychedelics such as MDMA for veterans suffering with “eating disorders (11), anxiety (12), alcohol and substance abuse (13), and PTSD (14)”⁵ or psilocybin “concerning the treatment of addiction, depression, and end-of-life mood disorders”⁶ are technologies for realigning individuals whose territories and refrains are non-normative, or severely disruptive to daily functioning as according to the normative regime and demands of ‘function’ inherent within capitalist society. That is to say, “psychedelia enables alterations that … opens windows on what is beyond the limit of imagination and explores the unimaginable” (Berardi, 2024).

Returning to our question of the ‘Human’ as structural fiction, the above engages with the question of how? to our what?. To make the connections presented in this article abundantly clear: The structural fiction is hegemonic narrative. The narrative is a refrain that situates us within our territory. The territory is singular, limited, and limiting. In response to contemporary issues such as the erasure of trans and queer+ lifeworlds and large scale censorship activities, we must find productive ways to resist. Resistance is not viable within the hegemonic idiom / homely territory. These overlapping concepts – narrative, refrain, territory – form the scaffolding of a symbolic order that defines what can be seen, said, and known. Therefore, we must refuse via deterritorialization = the production of alterity. Amerindian perspectivism and onto-prononymic refusal is one such cosmotechnical alternative for producing an a-signifying point of rupture. These points of rupture are catalysts for the production of alterity – that which refuses capture, breaking through epistemological horizons making space for lifeworlds otherwise.

And so, this provocation enters us into a new kind of embrace of ambiguity. An entrance into chaos as the very ground of potentiality; as that which springs forth from a place of unbound relations, diaphanous selves, and the creative act as an absolute declaration of care, love, and joy. In our willingness to deterritorialize, we embrace the world in an act of love and hope, asserting our unending belief in its beauty, wisdom, and guidance as it carves new rivers in the architectures of our soul and alights new pathways for the enunciation of breath in the co-constitutive recreation-subjectivation of the self-world.⁷ I urge us to work together and form a new episteme, a new way of being-human that is absolutely possible, latent and immanent within us and our bodies. It is in these moments of radical creativity, that the viscera of existence enact their work, that the immaterial does the work of materializing. It is in these moments that we dip into the absolutely fertile void (sunnaņ) and emerge anew.

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Endnotes:

1. Whereas the enunciation of the cogito – as reaction to the fear of a deceiving demon – was intended to be the very thing by which Descartes could find certainty (the affirmation of existential being through the recognition of oneself as a thinking thing: “I think, therefore I am”), the cogito as an invocation of Cartesian mind-body dualism, simultaneously inaugurates the very “constructed logics of absolute disjunction” referenced above. The ‘I’ is a pronoun; it signals an epistemic and ontological shift into an age of ever increasing individuality, abstraction and transcendence. In this way, the ‘cogito becomes demon itself’ – not as defense against illusion, but the very architecture of an illusory world bifurcated into self and other, mind and body, man and world. ↩︎
2. Pushing further, there is the question of what underwrites Freudianism as a module for subjectification. Namely, the master-slave dialectic as embodied in the relationship between the ego and the superego wherein the superego introjects the value system of Capital, operating as an immanent war machine that consistently makes demands and orients the actions of the Ego. ↩︎
3. The father appears—not as a fully legible being, not as a ghost, not merely a memory—but as a presence that unfixes categories of life/death, self/other, I/Thou. ↩︎
4. ‘Alterior’ is used here as a poetic neologism derived from ‘ulterior’, suggesting not merely an alternative, but that which lies beyond the immediately visible or admitted – a concealed or latent potentiality. ↩︎
5. https://www.ptsd.va.gov/professional/treat/txessentials/psychedelics_assisted_therapy. ↩︎
6. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8901083/ ↩︎
7. A Cosmopoetic Horizon that is deterritorializing in love. Berardi breathes through collapse, I breathe through rupture into emergence. ↩︎

References

Berardi, Franco. 2024. Quit Everything: Interpreting Depression. London: Repeater.

Castro, Eduardo Batalha Viveiros de, and Peter Skafish. 2014. Cannibal Metaphysics. Univocal. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Derrida, Jacques, Pascale-Anne Brault, and Michael Naas. 2001. The Work of Mourning. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Guattari, Félix. 2008. The Three Ecologies. Translated by Ian Pindar and Paul Sutton. Continuum Impacts. London: Continuum.

Hamilton, Clive. 2020. “TOWARDS A FIFTH ONTOLOGY FOR THE ANTHROPOCENE” Angelaki 25 (4): 110–19. [https://doi.org/10.1080/0969725X.2020.1790839](https://doi.org/10.1080/0969725X.2020.1790839).