“Speculative Cannibalism: Derrida and Viveiros de Castro”

A public workshop with Professor Valeria Campos Salvaterra

Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso, Chile

Wednesday, March 8, 2023

12:00-1:30pm

Taper Hall (THH) 309

University of Southern California

Through an analysis of Jacques Derrida’s published and unpublished works on philosophy (1969-1990), in dialogue with Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s Amerindian perspectivism, we will attend to one of the most interesting attempts to build a ‘new’ episteme. With Derrida, we will review the ‘cannibalism’ of modern philosophy and psychoanalysis, to relate it to the ancient practice of (literal and symbolic) cannibalism, nuclear for the anticolonial scope of anthropology proposed by Viveiros de Castro. Campos Salvaterra will argue that eating is not simply one metaphor among others, but performs the very movement of metaphorization

Valeria Campos Salvaterra is a professor and researcher at the Institute of Philosophy of the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso, Chile. She is author of the books Violencia y fenomenología. Derrida entre Husserl y Levinas (Santiago: Metales Pesados, 2017), Transacciones peligrosas. Economías de la violencia en J. Derrida (Santiago: Pólvora, 2018), Comenzar por el terror. Ensayos sobre filosofía y violencia (Buenos Aires: Prometeo, 2020), and of many articles on the problem of violence in contemporary philosophy. Campos has recently expanded her field towards the use of rhetorical figures associated with food in the continental philosophical tradition, which have allowed her to approach epistemological and ontological problems from a new perspective. She also conducts research on applied philosophy on ethics and food, with an emphasis on cultural and political studies.

This event is co-sponsored by the USC Experimental Humanities Lab, the Thematic Option Honors Program, the Departments of Latin American and Iberian Cultures and Comparative Literature, the Center for Latinx and Latin American Studies, and the Comparative Studies in Literature and Culture Doctoral Program