Economic development and cosmopolitical re-involvement: the principle of reasonable sufficiency 1

Eduardo Viveiros de Castro Museu Nacional

Whoever comes after will have to make do (“An old Brazilian proverb” in Warren Dean, With Broadax and Firebrand: The Destruction of the Brazilian Atlantic Forest )

As the symbol that the physis chose as one of its guises around last century’s end, Amazonia has now become an arena in which a decisive match is being played: the players involved, bringing together the micro and macro-political in unprecedented ways, compete over the meaning of the future. Leaving behind the dialectics of State and Nature, these two imaginary totalities that have been reciprocally constituted by a confrontation from which people and their myriad associations were always excluded (either represented by the fi rst, or identified to the second), a new geopolitics now takes over. Exchanging the naturalization of politics for the politicization of nature, directly connecting the land to the Earth, thereby skipping over the old national territorializations, the geopolitics of environmentalism refuses to entrust the State with the guardianship of the infi nite and the monopoly on totalization. Along with the State, Nature — a certain idea of Nature — must be brought down as well. Geopolitics transmutes into cosmopolitics. We could view things, of course, the other way around, seeing the old in the new. Environmentalist discourse may be read as the cosmology of late capitalism, a resacralization of history and geography that would close the cycle opened by the expansion of the West in the fifteenth century; a dramatic reterritorialization on a planetary scale of all those local, national
1 This text was written as a reply to a number of statements made in 2008 by the then “Extraordinary Minister for Strategic Affairs” of Brazil, the political scientist R. Mangabeira Unger. During Mangabeira's brief ministerial mandate, Marina Silva, the Minister for