Spectrality and the Ontology of Amerindian Myth

Abstract

This essay embarks upon a conceptual exploration into the intricate relationship between myth and spectrality within the context of Amerindian ontologies, primarily engaging with the theoretical frameworks of Claude Lévi-Strauss's Mythologiques and Hilan Bensusan's recent work on memory assemblages. It posits that myth, far from being a static repository of archaic narratives, functions as a dynamic operator, perpetually entangled with history, filtering and reconfiguring its perturbations to maintain semantic coherence. The inquiry navigates through Bensusan's notions of spectral ultrametaphysics and the logic of addition, hypothesizing an "intercode" that facilitates a translation between the concrete fabric of Indigenous thought and a philosophical discourse attuned to the persistence of the past. This past, it is argued, does not merely recede but rather accretes, returning spectrally to haunt and reconfigure the present. The essay thus seeks to elucidate how the "spirit of myth," characterized by its non-orientable topology and inherent endlessness, resonates with a conception of memory as an additive, generative force. Ultimately, it reconsiders myth not as an explanatory device but as a technology of non-disappearance, an ontological insurgency that proliferates versions and composes worlds through the incessant metamorphosis of forms and relations, thereby challenging Western metaphysical ambitions of fixity and totality.