Life Is Not Useful

Indigenous leader and activist Ailton Krenak reminds us that we must awaken from the comatose senselessness we have been immersed in since the beginning of the modern colonial project, where order, progress, development, consumerism, and capitalism have taken over our entire existence, leaving us only very partially alive, and, in fact, almost dead. To awaken from the coma of modernity is, for Krenak, to awaken to the possibility of becoming attuned to "the cosmic sense of life." He points out that the COVID-19 pandemic affects all so-called "human" lives and that the time is ripe for us all to reflect on and undo the exclusivity and distinction that have characterized the concept of humanity throughout Western modernity.

"Ailton Krenak is a unique voice in contemporary thought and the only one who manages to turn the current crisis into a huge opportunity to rethink the life of humanity. He demonstrates that our political identity is not based on the separate ownership of land, but on the fact that we all share one and the same flesh, which is the same flesh from which planet Earth lives. Earth is not the space where languages and cultures differ and wage war against each other, but the institution that allows us to share dreams with all that lives."Emanuele Coccia, author of Metamorphoses"A stinging critique of Western thought."Earthbound Report