Decolonizing the state of nature: Notes on political animism

Abstract

The essay argues that the convergence of posthumanism and postcoloniality may help questioning the theoretical dispositif of the Western ‘state of nature,’ thus overcoming the colonial fracture between political society and ‘premodern’ modes of existence. Some examples are provided of the resonances between postcolonial politics of knowledge and approaches to things and nature that, from within the boundaries of Western philosophical discourse, question the foundations of the post-Hobbesian ‘state of nature,’ mobilizing the unsettling energy of archaic relations to nonhumans.