Foreword to Of Enemies & Venison (2026)
I felt I should write a few words at the beginning of this text. Because, having been produced in 2021, during COVID, it already feels somewhat dated for me, but also because Yuk Hui, who we mostly associate the term cosmotechnics with, has since published two newer works which I believe refine, and push further, the question of cosmotechnics and technodiversity, namely Post-Europe (2024) and Machine And Sovereignty (2024). I don't think I need to make any changes following these publications, given that I am continuing my effort to develop a way of thinking that goes beyond European modernity and individuate a non-European thinking. In fact, what I have put forward here, in this book, is deeply informed with the very specific impasses found in contemporary Mexico, whether it be its recent economic development (as expressed in the Maya Train), its everyday racism, (exemplified by the whiteness of the actors in telenovelas and the political classes), or its handling of drug trafficking.
History has already proven, to us, the inadequacy, the facticity even, of the interweaving of pluriversalities and/or transmodernity into legal frameworks. I must emphasize that this demand to transcend Western modernity and its institutions is not about reforming the State in any way. It concerns rather its destruction and transcendence into a new, as yet undetermined, form, which we hope will leave more room for destituting power. I believe that a collapse, of the State as we know it, will favor the emergence of a plurality of cosmotechnics, ways of life, and conceptions of the good life, each specific to each form-of-life. Therein lies, always, something like real freedom, through (what I can simply call) a political community, as opposed to a State. I, therefore, still agree with Giorgio Agamben in Homo Sacer (1997) on the nature of such an institution, and of Western politics itself. My references to a “future Mexico” should, therefore, not be understood in terms of State renewal.
We can now turn to the question of identity. I was born to a Mestizo mother and a blue-eyed French-Canadian father, raised between the Oblatos neighborhood of Guadalajara and the Lower St. Lawrence region of Québec. I find myself caught between these two identities, which has created a number of distortions and tensions in my life that are not likely to be resolved anytime soon. The question of indigeneity, and whether I qualify, is itself an ironic point worth addressing: according to Canadian logic, based on the descent of one parent, perhaps I am Indigenous (and therein lies all the tension of contemporary Mexico); according to another logic, that of subscribing to an Indigenous cosmology and way of living, I am not. Yet one thing is certain for me: I cannot subscribe to the Western cosmology, nor way of living, either, which is embodied in a daily struggle over principles and practices whose outcome concerns, not only me, but civilization as a whole. My dissatisfaction with my life boils down to never being able to devote myself enough to the revolutionary task and the decolonial struggles in Quebec and Mexico. Perhaps I spend too much time writing such texts. Please excuse the academic form of this one; what you are reading is a heavily-edited Master's thesis that was the culmination of readings and questions about identity and, above all, theory. Today, I am attempting to extend my questions regarding Technology, the way we think with Technology, even further as a part of my Ph.D candidacy. My recent exposure to the field of Critical A.I. studies, in which I now work, has really radicalized me on the possibility of a political avenue that diverts from the track laid out by Heidegger, several decades ago—and yet, we must keep the faith, and enact it.
I encourage those reading this book to question their political practices and their thinking, including the ways in which they may at times unwittingly yet insidiously promote and subscribe to a particular vision of progress, development, and civilization—one not absent from parts of the political left. Moreover, war, for those who suffer it, is no longer a war, but rather the deployment of techno-capitalist sovereignty in impersonal “total mobilizations” (see chapter 4). We must be skeptical of such deadly and destructive events. This is not a plea for non-violence, but rather an affirmation of the need for radical skepticism about how the Empire wages war against us. In this present and future era of great remilitarization, we must be ready. Finally, I do hope that this abstract and overly cold book awakens something in terms of your own tradition of the oppressed, wherever you may be.
“One of the most destructive effects of colonial domination was to reduce the expression of Mesoamerican civilization to the narrow confines of the local community. It is not a question of reappropriating a village civilization, but of reconstructing the spaces necessary for the development of a renewed civilization, alive today and looking to the future.”— Guillermo B. Batalla, Deep Mexico