Paper short abstract:

This paper aims to discuss P. and H. Clastres’ contribution to the debate on Guarani and other amerindian peoples metaphysics. It focuses on their analysis of the speech of Guarani shamans, who move between different verbal genres – myth telling, metaphorical chants and metaphysical discourses.

Paper long abstract:

In the 1970's Pierre and Hélène Clastres started an effective dialogue between Western and amerindian thought. For example, they elicit from Guarani shamans' speculations on the relation between humans and divinities a critique of the principle of non-contradiction, which founds the hegemonic metaphysics of Being. The echoes of such a defiance can be heard in both contemporary anthropology (Viveiros de Castro, Latour inter alia) and philosophy (Maniglier inter alia).

P. Clastres has searched a sort of Guarani variant of his idea of the "society against the State"; which was a metaphysical version of the sociological problem of amerindian leadership: the refusal of political power and the choice for non-subjection. The "counter-State" that P. Clastres found among Guarani peoples has to be taken as a "war machine" of thought (sensu Deleuze & Guattari). A similar claim is posited by H. Clastres who reflects on Guarani prophetism, comparing historical and ethnographical accounts.

Following both P. and H. Clastres, one could say that Guarani metaphysics goes through language (nhe'e in Guarani means both "speech" and "soul"), understood as a way to the humans to become divinities. Myth telling appears as the expression of divine words. Metaphorical chants reveal themselves as a way to communicate with divinities in a process of becoming. Finally, the authors glimpse in the exegesis of myths and chants the birth of a kind of "metaphysical discourse", which could be compared to the emergence of philosophy in Antique Greece. Note that such a discourse has important political corollaries.