Insomnia epidemic: Kopenawa and the forgetfulness equivocity

.

Abstract

Friedrich Nietzsche said that transcendence and the negation of life, both proper of the autophagy of the West’s reactive nihilism, were product of an excess of memory, embodied in resentment and “vengeful soul”. On the other hand, to the Yanomami shaman Davi Kopenawa, indigenous leader and author of The Falling Sky together with the anthropologist Bruce Albert, the forgetfulness of the White people (nape pë) is responsible for their own decay — a decay that carries all non-White people with itself in a dizzying environmental and pandemic cataclysm of earthly scales; this is what Kopenawa and the Yanomami people call “falling sky”. In this paper, one intends to deal with this equivocal and perspectivist sense of oblivion, as one sees in it a crucial philosophical question: how to understand the double crossing between oblivion and memory when one quits the Western philosophical discourse and goes on to the sayings of a Yanomami thinker? Was there an equivocation of oblivion at stake, in the sense that forgetfulness is always different depending on its direction?