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Paper short abstract

The paper draws together situated indigenous critiques of (neo)liberal teleology/eschatology with the theory of time implied by the concept of Pachakuti to analyse the role of law in the making and unmaking of (post)colonial worlds, and to rethink analyses of neoliberalism through this prism.

Paper long abstract

This paper takes as its point of departure two statements from Aymara interlocutors about political pasts and futures; one asserts that the European invaders brought the ‘Neoliberal Republican system’ to Bolivia in the 16th century. The other, referring to the New Political Constitution of the State of 2009, asserts a temporal break between the republican and plurinational states, arguing that the neoliberal republican system has been left behind. The paper reads these interventions as discourses which engage and imply a philosophy of history. The first implies a theory of Neoliberalism as an always-already present possibility awaiting activation within the original colonial formation, prompting us to rethink any teleological account of neoliberalism as a successive or ‘late’ form of developing capitalism, and forcing us to think of neoliberalism rather as a latent presence prefigured in colonialism and through the historical and ongoing formation of subjects, pushing us to rethink political time as geometric rather than processual. The second engages the philosophy of the event, and implies a qualitative rather then quantitative break in relation to political time, offering a theory of how subjects are formed in the light (or darkness) of political technologies such as constitutions. The paper draws together these situated indigenous critiques of liberal teleology with the theory of time implied by the concept of Pachakuti to construct an argument around the role of law in the making and unmaking of (post)colonial worlds, and to rethink analyses of neoliberalism through this prism.