Public Talk III

Public talk III.

DEBRIS OF THE CATASTROPHE, RUINS AND VEGETAL SURVIVALS: spectral reverberations of quinine

In this approach we propose a philosophical and political approach to some of the ruins left behind by the reverberations of the colonial catastrophe associated with the cinchona tree: abandoned plantations and factories, parasitic ecologies that mutate, workers who insist on continuing a work that no longer turns a profit, ghosts that cling to and depend on the debris. The quinine extracted from this tree to cure malaria was clearly a material that fundamentally altered the course of history. Thinking through the phantasmal field of this world-historical substance leads us to imagine other forms of the post-colonial world we inhabit.

From this angle, we are interested in bringing to the table the continuity of two types of trajectories tied to the ruins of quinine: on the one hand, those that feed the fabric of a certain logic of imperial sovereignty present today; on the other, those that are re-edited, like the eternal return of a ghost, in the emancipation movements that return again and again as attempts at the transformation of a plebeian sovereignty. How to think the survivals of quinine? What forms does the debris take on when we try to look at it from archives that do not want to be trapped by the colonial archive? Are there inhabitable worlds that flourish from the ruins of quinine?

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