8/10/2019 Organizing Notes Fall 2009 With Materials

1/2

Acosta is significant because:

of his role in the emergence of Homo racialis (bearers of racial character)

- part of colonial and subduing the Americas

- beginning gestures of scientific classification of the human. The final moment of

the split between the hard and soft sciences. Claims lodged with in a history of

nature itself--Historia natural y moral de las indias

- gives us a glimpse into the role of Christian theology in coloniality and race

How the intellectuals of the 16thcentury consolidated what happened in the Iberian

project. To reckon with raciality and coloniality and simultaneously, science. Acosta

is in the shift from Catholic south to Protestant north. Acosta is trying to hold the

soft (humanities)and hard sciences together. The split suppressed the theological.

This is where modern science is born. The split was taken up by the Enlightenment,

to critique, to found reason on sure grounds. The racial imagination is the

architecture suppressed in the modern scientific imagination.

Homo racialis Language Social order [Kant]

- Reason is a social arrangement

- as scientific is religious and as religious is racial

- imperial containment in Europe is the analogy of the non-Jew outside Europe

New World Slavery, 9/11, modern religious, theological as Global imaginary

{Race Religion and Literature} Anijar

The Blood Laws

Christianity is being rooted on the bloodlines of Europe. Different blood is being

banished from Christianity. Theology is not the difference but raciality. The Jew is a

racial/religious body to be compared with the European to then be compared to the

rest of the world. Race is being constituted as a religio-scientific imaginary. In Kant,

the theological architecture is suppressed in his attempt to be scientific.

Jose de Acosta

- Spanish Jesuit 1514-1600

- 100 years after Columbus and the Modern World System- Interested in the debate about the colonial project between De las casas and

Sepulveda

- Enters the scientific enterprise for missionary work

- Language as the index of culture and civilization

- Sepulveda says Indians are Aristotlesnatural slave, De las Casas says they are

human. Las Casas says there are different levels of language and social order and

civilization. Biology is being hinged to culture through language. Literature attests to

8/10/2019 Organizing Notes Fall 2009 With Materials

2/2

the ability to control nature.

- Acosta levels of civilization. Christianity is a civilizing mission. The Americas are

understood with in Nature its self but this teleogical arch is the unfolding of the

West.

Three types:

1. True reason, cities, commerce, most important the knowledge and use of letters.

There the people are more civilized and more human. Chinese.

2. European influenced, strayed form the right use of reason. Must be conquered

through reason. No writing of philosophy and rights but have leaders and

governance. Some order of worship. No writing but ingenuity seen in memory

devices, calendars etc.

3. Like wild animals without law or government. In the new world there is an

infinite number of this last class.

Civility is tied to the European supremacy and the presence of a linguistic order

Second part of the book

- the Scientific apparatus

- linguistic technologies inscribe the Indian into the European telos

We must imagine ourselves beyond ourselves rather than render others in

reference to us.