This is neither an original paper, nor a review of Peter Fitzpatrick’s Mythology of Modern Law. I would have liked to write a paper that does justice to Fitzpatrick not only in reviewing key ideas the Mythology brings to the fore, but also in excavating its roots, radicalizing its aims and intensifying its movements. So, I propose a programme of writing, a paper to come, in the form of these reflections and perhaps an essay as a hall of mirrors or a mosaic of mirrors. I also promise that the reflections will one day show that the current discourse on corruption, on the one hand, shows the continuing operation of the negative constitution of modernity, through a typical operation, similar to the discourse on savagery. On the other hand, a reflection to come will demonstrate that certain “corrupt” societies are in fact more fully and comprehensively modern than those supposedly pristine. The Mythology is highly reflective, for it applies to western law the same hierarchizing strategies of modern colonial narratives. It is a sort of self-anthropology or self-ethnography. At the preface we can note that the book addresses Europe and North America, even though it contains ethnographic insights, and Levy-Strauss is only one key reference, that stem from the global South. And that realization triggers a desire to imagine the reverse operation of a rationality of indigenous law, or the Guayaquil’s reading of Peter Fitzpatrick’s Mythology (Guayquil’s being the group who inspired Pierre Clastre’s Society against the State), or the Araweté’s interpretation of modernity (the Araweté’s inspired Eduardo Viveiro de Castro’s Cannibal Metaphysics). Fitzpatrick performs “an internal decolonization” (p. 13) by adroitly “exoticizing the domestic”. I would attempt to think mythology from the perspective of those who are less enticed by the spell of modernity, despite belonging to it, and for whom at least certain moves of that mythology remain hollow, incomplete or originally corrupt. With this reflective programme I would seek to think the possibilities and impossibilities of a reversed universalization, apt to produce a paradox, what Derrida called the “paradox of paradox” (“The Other Heading”), and thus a general exposure of colonization. This paradoxicality is thinkable through deconstruction’s “polemic” strategy pushed to its own limits – that is addressing social formations through the strategy of inverting binary dichotomies with a view to a subtle move towards enjoying more equally our shared sense of order and orientation. The first paradox is of course the modern/colonial paradox: I am particular, I cherish and reflect the ways of my home, my class, my village, and my nation and yet I proclaim universal values. The second and more troubling is the subaltern who dares to claim universality and get out of the mutually reinforcing boxes of savagery and cultural particularity. The universal claim of the colonized brings about the paradox of paradox and the fragile event of a more equal enjoyment of our shared forces and affects. This task, however, is complex for a number of reasons, all of which pertain to a complex entanglement of myth and its corrupted forms:

• The Myth of Capital
• The Myth of Representation
• The Counter-Myth.

(A) According to Fitzpatrick, the modern colonial myth does not pertain to the remainder of the sacred, the resilience of rituals or the persistence of mythical imagery. It is rather the negation of myth and the mobilization of a lack, the absence of a superior referent which calls upon the ordering and naming subject. And this “subject”, to put in the language of Habermas, has an unfinished task ahead. “Low” reality, attributed to “others” and to “nature” alike, has to be conquered. The “Subject” emerges mediated by grand “ideas”, such as Humanity, State, Nation etc. The perfection of modern myth is making it more pervasive and all-encompassing. The complication here is that this mythic modernity in its so called “primitive accumulation of capital” achieves something: the spread of an actual-concrete universal form, the commodity-form, apt to colonize almost thoroughly land, labour and money. Make no mistake: these are indeed, as Marx saw it, mystifications, or fictions in the language of Karl Polanyi. Here the subject is set apart from the production process and, later, consumed in the consumption process. The tautological movement of modern capital derives its impulse from an extreme subjective form, sometimes called possessive individualism (Macpherson) or a “mode of production of subjectivity” (Deleuze/Guattari) that tends to “corrupt” itself. The “subject”, so goes the liberal myth, slowly but steadily extracts itself from community reference points and pursues his or her happiness in her own way. This drive, in turn, feeds into the economic autonomization and reification that will naturalize the human world. The subject will steadily lose its ethical-religious grounds and thus modern protestant asceticism, which had brought catholic monastic life into the secular world, turns out to be as Weber called it a “vanishing mediator”, liberating the subject to, as we shall see later, less altruistic goals. My question here is how to exoticize the unfamiliar, the distant. Perhaps we would have to demonstrate that unfamiliar, abstract systems are, despite the complexity of modern society, ultimately grounded on the familiarly “primitive” sociability forms. We would have to show, perhaps as Derrida in his seminal, the “Other Heading”, “L’Autre Cap”, that capitalism is indeed dependent on capital, on the polarity of a centre, and thus to a mechanism of social orientation that turns on hierarchical binary distinctions: male/female, white/black, civilized/primitive, friend/enemy, and so forth. “Capitalism” does not erase all hierarchies, and rather mobilizes them in a system of exploitation and alienation. Exposing the contingency of these binary distinctions and the relations of power ingrained in modern institutions is a way forward. And yet we cannot neglect the rise of roguish or corrupted forms of subjectivity. It is not only the asceticism that brought about the impulse of capitalism but what the ancients would call “vice”. At the inception of modern economic theories, of laissez-faire itself, we find Mandeville’s elevation of luxury and selfishness as elements that benefit the social order. For Hayek, Mandeville is the father of the so-called “spontaneous orders” that populate the neoliberal utopia. In Mandeville we find both the drive of the unbound subject and the groundwork for a consumerist society.  Here the contours of global capitalism are brought to the fore as uniting selfish vice and ascetic virtue, as well as the order of “progressive” subjectivity and the unfinished progress of its abstractly ordered systems. As Schmitt’s nomos, but in ways foreign to Schmitt, capital provides the unity of order and progress, where progress occupies the place of what Schmitt called orientation. Modern paradoxes abound here, but is it worth exposing them? What if they thrive on their own exposure? It is certainly not an exposure as myth – modern myth is its negation and its double at the same time – but exposure as dynamism, contradiction, geniality, complex of opposites, and in a way the very ground of authority, the mystical ground of authority that inspires belief and awe. And yet this “structure” seems rather oblique or whitened or corrupted. Modern “myth” avows myth’s denegation and, as in Derrida’s “White Mythology”, corrupts myth so that “it” can thrive in its splendour. The wealth, the power, the splendour can only be created out of a dive into one’s poverty, fragility and vice. No matter how we call it: white mythology, modern myth, corrupted myth, the negation of myth, rationality, what remains is that modernity conjures up mythic categories that promote an actual worldwide system of production of outcasts and exploitation of labour, be it physical or intellectual, living or dead, of the poor, the fragile and the roguish. (B) The exploitative splendour of capital leads me to another dimension of modern myth, and that is the myth of political representation. So far, this picture has been rather deterritorialized, and the movement of the subject-in-capital seemed autonomous and protean in a direct relationship with the rise of the commodity form, the radical abstract-ization of collective experiences and the global spread of the old market institution. Modern agency hides itself in clothing other than those of the modern subject. The polity will be able to forge the conditions for the accumulation of capital and for its own self-positing subsistence. The baroque sovereign, origin of the modern idea of representation, needs to be called to the fore. The modern principle of representation does not equate to the postulation of democracy, even though the dominant political form today, and not only in the West, is representative democracy – which could also be named sovereign democracy. As Louis Marin taught us the baroque monarch’s transcendent visibility inspired belief and awe, and “represented” an idea larger than himself (transitive meaning), be it God, the Nation or the People, relying both on his dignity, his worthiness of title and on force (which includes the “force” of a title – intransitive sense of representation: “represent means intensifying, insisting and redoubling a presence”).  The absolute sovereign force amidst other absolute forces enters a restless struggle whose resolution is invariably a coup that annihilates opponents and establishes a “capital” that brings together, in a territory and for a people, the unity of order and orientation. As Marin also noted, later in his writings, the secret force of the sovereign is equally important: instilling fear, discipline, and also frivolity, playing and gaming, as if merging itself with the imperatives of the social structure. Something happens though when a civil society and popular movements opposed to the sovereign are brought to the equation. In metropolitan centres, private and common interests unwilling to bow to the sovereign’s accumulation build a social-political network in which narratives, arguments and different social forces are brought together in what has conventionally been called the public sphere. In the colonies, various movements of resistance against political centralization and exploitation of indigenous resources have led to coalitions that steadily reclaimed markers of their identity and autonomous mechanisms for development. Populism, despite its contradictions and alleged class reconciliation, has been a key marker of that will to non-domination. In both cases, the construction of a national identity is set against the arbitrariness of a central authority, despite the different ways in which the apparatus of the state is classified either as a problem or as a solution (and despite remoter referents for nationhood often mobilized to reinvent the modern nation). Two forms of coups follow against nascent democracy: on the one hand, the people sap the authority of the former metropolitan sovereign, and that allows room for a more diffuse reign of “capital” (statist and private), and on the other, the state stages a coup through which the people is integrated into state hierarchy as units within a popular sovereign body that represses them at worst and provides for them at best. Regardless of this primal modern coup, the democratic principle insidiously integrates postulations incompatible with sovereign hierarchy and productive exploitation. With that we come to the crisis of representation that is characteristic of modern democracy. Clearly, the corrupting, vicious aspect of capital and modern subjectivity has a bearing on this process, as much as the sense of equality that emerged from the struggles against authority and the bond that arose in the mobilization and awareness-raising of those whose labour had been exploited. Here I do not espouse Laclau’s vision of the inevitability of representation. Laclau claimed that resistance to representation implied a desire of “presence”, pure presentation, and mistook as representation the metonymic grammar of politics in which taking the part for the whole is the game. At the same time, I hold reservations about the idea that the place of power is empty in democracy – waiting to be contingently and provisionally filled by political articulations and interpretations of generalizable signifiers, or “empty signifiers”. I would rather argue that the principle of representation in its infinite crisis is part and parcel of the nomos of capital – and thus neither mere accessory superstructure nor purely independent of social relations of power and production. The modern democratic postulation, on the contrary, despite its instrumentalization, names a desire for a polity that is foreign to the principle of representation, and, differing from its ancient counterpart, touched by an equal sharing of the creative encounters of our shared forces and affects. What we witness today with the rise of social media and various new social and communication technologies is another chapter in the sapping of the sovereign representative, and yet not necessarily its end or its final demise. We can always imagine new coups that will tame the participatory force of people and the sensitivity to each other’s forces of creation that could likewise increase if properly nurtured and catered for. In the peripheries this is particularly clear: that is where the mythic representation never really worked on its own, or where this myth is profoundly and explicitly associated with symbolic, police, disciplinary and media violence in a hyper-cynical regression for whom progress is but an empty mirage. In those circumstances, discourses of hope devoid of engagements in concrete struggles are ancillary to the most hierarchical and exploitative social formations. And it is evident everywhere that the state’s potential for control has increased rather than decreased with the rise of current technological tools. But the operative devices for the continuation of the nomos are not only “technological”. Perhaps the most pervasive today is a narrative: the current discourse on corruption. Despite being integral to capital accumulation, corruption has been elevated to the level of the key scourge of modern politics, particularly in the developing world. National discourses scapegoat corrupt politicians for society’s own common and unavoidable corruption. While the international discourse, in the name of decency, governance and transparency, relegates the corrupt state to the purview of a plethora of intergovernmental and non-governmental organizations, who will ask nothing less than compliance with the way of doing business in the centre – no less corrupt, but perhaps more sophisticated. Our attempt should not be to salvage representation in the hope that a people will speak in one voice against capital. Disowning modern representation does not mean the absence of activism, participation and agency. And Fitzpatrick’s avowed aim to elaborate a counter-myth (preface) in a way “authorizes” his readers to pursue novel mythic counter moves. Is there a chance for a reversed universalization, a general decolonization and the paradox of paradox? Is a counter-myth equivalent to counter-hegemony? Is counter-myth modern? If modern myth is a corrupt form of myth, what to say of the counter myth? Is it integral, pure, original myth? Or is it a corruption of corrupted myth and thus a revolutionary task? Is it a revolutionary epistemological task, like the epistemic break of Bachelard or a novel scientific paradigm for the analysis of myth? (C) I was partly drawn to these “reflections” by Sorel’s Reflections on Violence, who gave myth a particularly relevant role in the proletariat movement. He defined myth as “idealized vision that motivates action” and saw the “revolutionary general strike” as myth. What I would like to retain is the determination to action and the underlying antagonism. Yet this idealized vision is too close to representation and also unsurprisingly close to some features of fascism – and with the current fascism of capital. It suffices to say that Sorel thought that the anarcho-unionist movement had some family resemblance with the “individualist” impetus, the “morality of the lords” and the creative energy of the North-American conquest of the Old West.  Gramsci, in turn, identified in Machiavelli’s Prince and in the modern revolutionary Party, the princely agency, of mythic stature, that could provide the subjective elements of revolution. Here, as opposed to Sorel, the mythic action of the modern Prince is much more nuanced and takes into account an affirmative element of the proletariat’s cultural and ideological battles. It is not only oppositional and destructive, but also affirmative and responsive. This mythic dimension of revolution can be easily found in Marx’s own writing, as for instance in his 18^th Brumaire, in the “progressive” form characteristic of modernity: “The social revolution of the nineteenth century cannot take its poetry from the past but only from the future.” Various structuralist Marxists have sought to identify in class struggle a type of “effect” of the contradictions of the social relations as a whole. But like Lacoue-Labarthe I see rather an extraordinary poetic power in the Marxist corpus (see his translation of Heidegger’s “Die Armut” – “La pauvreté”) in imagining concrete social struggles and particular instantiations of exploitation as defining “nodal points” of the mode of production and the strategic opportunity for effecting real change to the social order (borrowing “nodal points” from Poulantzas, the most accomplished political structuralist). In any event, the pursuit of a concrete social agent capable of reincarnating the Prince, the third-state, the proletariat, the anarcho-unionists, the Revolutionary Party, or a coalition of outcasts, as in Marcuse, have not waned in more recent years. We have had Negri’s depiction of the multitude, with its extremely optimistic vision of the possibilities of debunking Empire as a decentred “network” that could suffer a fatal blow regardless of the density or the weight of the link affected. Hardt and Negri’s merit is to have been connected to concrete experiences of struggle, be it in the case of the autonomist movement in Italy, be it later in the anti-globalization movement, especially manifested in G-8 meetings in the 90’s and 2000’s. In other instances, an array of public intellectuals of the global south have supported reclaiming and democratizing the state. In the past 15 years, a wave of left-wing governments in Latin America have inspired or been inspired by that theoretical trend – that goes back to the 80’s and a rethinking of the left contemporary of the demise of the Soviet bloc. The latest emancipatory political impetus was associated with an inversion of priorities of local and national authorities – away from debt servicing and into distributive policies, some of which with the blessing of the financial institutions of the global capital order. Within that wave, there have been cases more closely related to the populist tradition, with its anchorage in political representation and in natural resources and state monopolies of hydro-carbonates, and also cases in which a plural intensification of democracy, a democratic revolution has been conceived even though never fully put in practice. With various degrees of success and various degrees of reconciliation with capital, these experiences relied on models of participatory democracy that have attempted to overcome the state-civil society divide and to provide alternatives to the classical institutions of representative democracy. The reasons for the more recent failures and reversal of those processes should be sought, on the one hand, in its internal betrayals, including overconfidence in the neutrality of the state apparatus and in the powers of the state itself (through an often misguided and “neutral” version of republicanism), and, on the other, on the conservative resistance that these policies have generated due to their success in lifting people out of poverty and providing them with a higher, albeit limited, level of access to public services. I would like to shed light on what I called above the neutrality of the state apparatus and along with it the supposed neutrality of the judiciary. From a certain republican and Weberian take that spread to Latin America’s political parties from its social democratic counterparts in Europe, there is a view that the state, marked by a relatively autonomous bureaucracy, is a kind of ship that can be steered by whoever is placed in command after fair and regular elections. Gramsci himself criticised this reductive approach that minimizes class, capital and ingrained ideological prejudices. And yet this is only the more superficial problem. The underlying question concerns the left-wing discourse becoming more political-ethical-juridical rather than political-economic-epistemic – contrary to previous incarnations of the modern prince.  Despite “reclaiming the state” (to use the title of Hillary Wainwright’s hopeful book – which starts with the ascension of Lula in Brazil), a number of left-wing movements in Latin America failed to present real, comprehensive and credible alternatives, affirmative and antagonistic, to the order and orientation of capital. This is no claim for an anti-capitalist politics, but a claim for “disputing” capital itself (as we will see later). More on the level of theory than of policies, and to use the distinction of Chantal Mouffe against her purposes, left-wing discourse became meta-political and meta-democratic rather than centred on a substantive politics of emancipation. Despite contemplating various possibilities of democratic participation and democratization of the state, left wing theory missed the point that such efforts have to be complemented by relevant exposures and negotiations of the laws and dividing lines of sociability, access to goods and services, and promotion of economic, cultural and natural democracies – and of course, in its external dimension, promotion of free republics, as much as possible free from domination. The lack of a general theory of emancipatory politics (or a theory of emancipation, rather the collection of “emancipations” – to use Laclau’s term) or a theoretical practice of emancipation contributed to a reductionist “politics of the immediate” – that notwithstanding its important palliative social policies did little to challenge the deep seated structures of capital. The lack of such an alternative, this corruption of the myth of the modern prince led to the capitulation of the left to the pliable universalism of human rights and to judicial idealism. The state was “reclaimed” for the sake of human rights. And thus state sovereignty was reclaimed for the sake of subjective sovereignty and a concept of human dignity wholly compatible with the nomos. Evidently, in various political instantiations the politics of rights can have emancipatory effects when referring to a claim that exceeds the state-form and rights-form themselves. But this possibility is hindered by overflowing and empowering the judiciary with demands that it could not adequately address. The movement of thought can be traced from substantive transformative claims, hollowed out by social fragmentation and functional differentiation and specialization, to democratic proceduralism (be it deliberative or participatory – regardless of the merits of the latter) and then back to substantive ethical claims that recovered the place of the particular-universal. Let me also reiterate the obvious point that those claims albeit “counter-mythical” also help shaping the modern myth in providing a credible instrument for progress. The link between socialism and democracy was formulated by a party intellectual for the first time by Enrico Berlinguer, PCI, in 1977, at the 50^th anniversary of the Russian Revolution: “democracy today is not only the territory where the class adversary is forced to recede, but also a historically universal value on which an original socialist society is to be built”. This becomes the cornerstone of Carlos Nelson Coutinho’s seminal article “Democracy as Universal Value” in 1979 (the same year of the creation of the Workers Party in Brazil – despite Coutinho’s membership of the Communist Party at the time, he would join the PT a few years later only to leave in 2004). He was a nuanced Marxist intellectual, perhaps our best, in the tradition of Gramsci and Lukacs, but his influence derived from a non-philosophical expression: value was neither theorised as such nor referred in any way to Marx’s theory of value. It was assumed that “some forms and structures” of bourgeois democracy would be applicable to socialism, for which the authorities of Luxembourg, Lenin and the early Marx himself were brought to the fore. Despite having relevant arguments also based on Brazil’s struggle against its elite “Prussian way”, with democracy as an overdue alternative, the key idea that remained influential and proved dominant on the left was that democracy as such was an inescapable value. From the value of democracy to the value of human rights – brought together by their ethical-sovereign dignified or decent core – was a short distance, and in a way the coincidence of socialist values with liberal values (nothing here of course diminishes the relevance of diverse social movements in their concrete struggles that have been brought together by this discourse, but it does limit somewhat their scope). If democracy in a way can be seen as corruption of the myth of representation, it can also be seen as corruption of the counter-myth of the proletariat. A further complication stems from the legal mediation of the moralization of politics, in so far as the juridical itself becomes acutely marked by ethical injunctions. In various post-dictatorial Latin American settings, the new democratic instruments seemed to offer ample ground to challenge formalistic traditions and the characteristic reluctance of legal officers to engage with social problems. Critique grounded in the ideological role of law and its class belonging waned before cynical and idealistic moves that sought to reaffirm democracy through law – as if democracy were law’s unfinished task – an antidote to law’s originary corruption. It is thus symptomatic that one of the most radical proponents of the “alternative law movement” in the 90’s in Brazil, judge Amilton Bueno de Carvalho, proposed “natural law in the making”, as a historical ethical ground independent from positive law. But also various left-leaning jurists, like Clemerson Clève from Paraná, realized that it would be unnecessary to resort to natural law, for positive law, and the Constitution, contained all the ethical ingredients for judicial activism and an extensive and creative method of interpretation. One of Clève’s students proposed an idea particularly telling, and that is judge Sergio Moro’s Judicial Review as Democracy (Jurisdição Constitucional como Democracia). According to the argument, one key justification for judicial review of legislation is enhancing democracy’s very institution, like when legislating on the electoral system. This derives from Habermas’s procedural and minimalist take on constitutional “jurisdiction”, but turning it upside down. For Habermas, judicial review should be strictly limited to provisions threatening the possibility of exercising civil rights (in fact, a cautious reading of Habermas would warrant the incompatibility between democracy and judicial review, which is allowed into his system for more practical and historical than for substantive reasons). In Moro’s work, on the contrary, it becomes a new and powerful justification for existing judicial review mechanisms: “judicial activism can be justified through the democratic ideal”. Ideal here is strictly unrelated to “private interests” (p.240), whereas actual democratic practices he treats with suspicion: “bargaining between private interests foreign to the republican ideal” call for a “profound investigation on the history of the legislative act, with a view to examine the spurious motivations that influenced its inception”. Yet, what it reveals, is the truth contained in its title: democracy reduced to Constitutional Jurisdiction, for it will be up to judicial authorities to determine what is and what is not a valid motivation. This rationale is equally furthered by the international trend to use a balancing exercise for solving intractable oppositions of juridical principles, which bear a family resemblance with the increasingly influential “pragmatic” take on law. No matter how obscene this may sound, this very logic is already inscribed at the heart of judicial review in its European and North-American varieties. Back to the spurious, abject or corrupt motivations of law: we have seen that they dwell at the heart of the nomos. The widespread ethical narrative on decency and fight against corruption seems thus to replace and sap from within every form of progressive politics, every counter-myth. The combination of cynical capital and idealistic representation – in its infinite degeneration and regeneration – and the absence of an effective political-economic-epistemic theory of emancipation do not offer much hope to counter-myth-making. Yet, here reflection and strategic positioning can offer a disconcerting avenue: what if the discourse on corruption and the pursuit of decency masked a deeper anti-nomic meaning? The strength of this anti-nomy, however, does not stem from a pure logical inversion. For the same “society” that revolts against corruption is itself corrupt in the first place. What is key is both an economic and epistemic sensitivity to the common participation in the creation of wealth, in the creation of value, the realization of our shared constitution and deconstitution, exposure to our myth-making and myth-corrupting forces. Here democracy is also a universal value. But where a different form of “value” should take centre stage, as the universal democratization of value – not only to “reclaim” and democratize the state, but to devise a dynamic public sphere so as to decolonize capital, in both its progressive-economic and its representational-political dimensions. The epistemic dimension refers to the realization that the subaltern already are the makers and keepers of the nomos and yet they have something else to offer and share. And one should not be hindered by the structural limitations of the public sphere in modern conditions, supposedly impermeable to the dedication and time necessary for a robust social engagement: for the transformation of the world of work and the modern labour force would rather open more possibilities for participation and reinforcement of the public sphere. This universal claim of the colonized has its anthropological roots. Eduardo Viveiros de Castro has for many years put forward an ontological turn that gives full credit to the claims of Amerindian peoples, what he calls multinaturalism, as an ontology, and perspectivism, as an epistemology. According to him, the binary distinction between nature and culture is distinctly understood in Amerindian “metaphysics”. In the West, nature would refer to fixed or determinate phenomena, whereas culture is the flexible and variable term. In Amerindian thought, nature is the flexible and variable term, whereas culture is fixed and determinate. At the origin of time, what one finds is not animality out of which humanity evolved, as in scientific modernity, but humanity itself – or an agency whose qualities are tantamount to “human” qualities, and when each entity saw each other for what they are. In the present, the jaguars see themselves as humans, whereas they, and other predators, see humans as tapirs or peccaries, who see humans as jaguars – and successively so that all of nature is relational. I cannot enter in detail and I remain agnostic as to ontology, but what matters here is the relation of this account to the nomos. In fact, this “metaphysics” seems more truthful to current conditions of capital, and even perhaps to metaphysics in general. Subjectivity, not without its roguish contours, remains central and in contrast to rational or self-referential systems that swallow up a no longer fixed or stable nature, and more than that, subjectivity is hardly perceived as having a foundation in nature. Thus, more than giving legitimacy to an ontological “perspective”, I am tempted to conclude that this anthropological metaphysics, inspired by Amerindian encounters, conceals some truth of the West itself. On the other hand, this extreme metaphysics reveals a mimetic power, the shamanic ability to play between worlds (each one of them the whole world) that can offer something else, perhaps a vicarious force to be shared. Thus I both agree and disagree with Viveiros de Castro when he sets indigenous peoples outside capital and state: “For me, Indians are all of those large minorities who are, in some way, on the outside of this capitalist mega-machine, of consumption, of production, of 24 hour a day labour, seven days a week.  These planetary Indians teach us to dispense with the giant machines of transcendence that are the State on the one hand, and the speculative system on the other, the market transformed into image” (interview to El País/2014).  The vast majority of indigenous peoples, and the vast majority of subaltern peoples are somehow subjected to the modern creation of wealth. Perhaps an ethnographic research yet to come will eventually attest that whenever they live in their world, they do so with dignity and decency. Perhaps “they” shall teach “us” that the mimetic power of capital is irreducible to the current nomos. They shall teach us one day that the propensity to the universal is universal and that the other is universal. Being sensitive to the subaltern’s centrality in value-making processes, debased and exploited by the current capital-state-global system, and to our capacity to make decent worlds should serve as guidance to the pursuit of a concrete universal affirmation, through which new orders and orientations may be forged. Pablo Ghetti is a Brazilian career diplomat, PhD, University of London, Birkbeck, and former lecturer at the Universities of Exeter (UK) and Cândido Mendes (Brazil).