Monotony – Lack of Purpose and Repetition

October 2020 (Wall Street International)* — Everything always the same. Repetition presides over processes, from metabolic ones to the passage of time: day, night, light, dark, birth, death, and old age. Having to make a living, having to feed, to get through life is the biggest contradiction of the process, of the dynamics of life. There is continuity only if there is maintenance. Linking dynamics to statics, movement to inertia, is dialectical. Living without contradiction is as desired as it is impossible.

The Guarani Indians, for example, execrated the evil land, hated the One, hated unity. For them, the One is every corruptible thing, and the mode of existence of the One is transient, temporary, ephemeral.

The Guarani hated the transitory, the passage, the change, and thought it was generated by the One, which they considered as the incomplete.

We, the Westerners, understand unity as the whole, the nonfragmented, which stands as autonomy and possibility. In this sense, our coincidence in relation to the Guarani is summed up in the admission of unity, the One as a unique possibility of dynamization, that is, change, passage, which is good for us. Divergence arises when, for the Guarani, change, transience is bad. As they themselves say:

… and often we got there, on the beaches, on the borders of the evil land, almost at the sight of the goal, the same ruse of the Gods, the same pain, the same failure: obstacle to eternity, the sea going with the Sun.

(Pierre Clastres, A sociedade contra o estado, 1978, Ed. Francisco Alves, Rio de Janeiro)