## I. FIRST APPROACHES Oblivion that saves; dramatic representation in the backstage of Christian publicity; ritual matrices in local communities of beings, human and non-human; reverse hospitality... in those experiences and expressions, there are other (very other) ethics, other politics, other epistemic ways of knowledge. Following their paths I have talked (and written, thinking with/in/on my feet) about "semiopraxis". An extended common disciplinary and social sense perceives and thinks Culture as a way of seeing, feeling, and living within a community that gathers around this prognating consensus. But this is a Westernized way of understanding culture, marked by Eurocentric defensive self-tropings and its policies of world colonization. In outer non-Western communities, the sense, the practices and, above all, the medium of hospitality is other (Grosso, 2014a; 2015a; 2017a). The concept of community expands there and embraces human beings together with the non-human, the living and the dead, gods and elements, in a network of relationships. The plot of health, gifts, power, wise walking and feasts -in vast post-Christian territories and in Andean terms called "suerte", "to get lucky"- makes living and dying there would-be episodes of a dramatic narrative that is spent in its random and molecular becoming (Grosso, 2016a). It is not indoors community where reception takes place. Involving relations of welcome are renewed at every step. But not only in new ties, rather more revolving, shuffling and interweaving the practical matrix, re-constellating it together with all implied beings. Community and hospitality involve the dramatic encounter and interaction of ancient and new, many nouns and renamed beings, huge and small ones, longstanding inhabitants and foreigners, in a vast intercultural scene. In it everything changes, turning each being, and all of them, into another. This reconstellation finds no rest in any monadic cultural horizon, but rather blurs contours and stages the ritual drama in its wide spectrum of a sensitive spectacle. "Identity" is perhaps an erroneous term for this erratic and indomitable torsion. Becoming another among others is a form of resistance not appreciated by the Western self-centering and repeated return on Self. It is neither the continuity of the Same, and nor is it the dissolution into nothingness. The difference, by virtue of (in)constant displacement, never falls into the undifferentiated. The local community of beings, in its ritual agency, goes out to meet the others, encounters them outside there, altering the uncritical assumed frame of inside "hospitality". And in doing so, it becomes a potent and silent critical semiopraxis in decolonizing politics. With scandalous evidence, from rural ways and "customs" ("costumbres") and not from the refined moods of the polis, this difference in ritual agency raises its emancipatory gesture from (Western) "barbarism", and not from the cosmopolitical "clash of civilizations". Fieldwork experiences in northern Argentina (Grosso, 2008a), in the Bolivian highlands (Grosso, 1994) and in the Colombian Cauca (Grosso, 2006) have made me think of this other as reverse hospitality. ## II. RITUAL AND COMMUNITY Representation happens within the whole semiological, theatrical and performative range of drama. In ritual context, it integrates both, the mystical relationship and the medium in which it takes place. Sacred space-time generates a field of materialities and actions where the symbolic over-determination takes possession of the world, in width and depth. Power always mounts a spectacle. Dark and sublime forces intervene in that plot of relationships, animating a scenic magnetism that encourages multiple gifts and crosses everything with excess. Bodies, emotions, spaces, sacred figures and objects find a field of high intensity there, that constitutes an inaugural and renovated world of relationships. There they meet: the gods with the dead, the animals and the plants with the stars, the hills and the stones with books and fire... An enlarged cosmic discourse breaks down what the Greek-European-Western tradition has unsuccessfully attempted to delimitate: both, and each of them separately, the "human" and the "divine" from the rest. Always the rest, the residual, forgotten and growing up, surrounds and threatens to become an ignominious story, a spreading and dark hope, a matter of salvation. Mainly in post-colonial territories, this enlarged cosmic discourse invades the lights and shades of popular religiosity beyond (or rather, more over here) the "human" trope and the "divine" monotheistic pole. This cosmic of high intensity meeting inhabits every sacred relationship and is untranslatable to logic, and irreducible. It even exceeds the commercialization of faith and the tourist supply through which capitalism has integrated the devotions and religious circuits to its circulations as a value of change, simultaneously expropriating expressions, feelings and symbols, and adding them to its accumulation device. There, we would say with Georges Bataille, that sacrifice fights against accumulation and, ultimately, we will always be in the religious (or mystical) scene (Bataille, 1998). Bataille says that sacrifice is "to abandon and to give" (Bataille, 1998: 52). It is the "antithesis of production" and accumulation, and their lasting in time; meanwhile "consumption [is] not having more interest than for the instant", often realised in fire combustion (53). Therefore, there are two figures of "consumption": an accumulative (capitalist) one, and a destructive (sacrificial) one. And, respectively, two modes of enjoyment: retention and gift. Capitalist retention comes together with the stability of things, while the sacrificial gift gets lost in festive suspension and derives each thing in another (frequently, smoke and ashes). This way, religiosity represents apotheotic combats in diverse assemblages of "economy" and "culture". In postcolonial relations, these struggles adopt epic configurations that become the mise-en-scène of great shows of scrambled and frayed (hi)stories. Large dominant narratives found on them their embracing continuities, while subaltern counter-narratives collide with and rub against them. Confronting that dominant History, these counter-narratives deform, pervert and break the space and time that it sustains and naturalizes. In Northern Argentina, some intense religious devotions –either widespread or more localized– grew under the ecclesiastic gaze, while others emerged in the wild grasses of popular beliefs. Among the first ones: the Virgin of the Valley of Catamarca, the Lord of the Miracles of Mailín, Saint Barbara of Manogasta, The Indian Virgin of Tuama, Saint Stephen of Sumamao, Saint Gil of Sacha Pozo (to those I dedicated in-depth studies, see Grosso, 2008a), Saint Rose of Tastil, and the Lord of the Miracle of Salta. And among the popular beliefs: the Gauchito Gil, the Defunct Correa (a woman), Carballito; and, darker and in underground: the salamancas. $^{1}$ These all are devotions of entrance and exit through which the agents circulate taking "suerte" ("luck"), and elaborating, through multiple passages, a knot/text, facing incompatibilities for the scope of a frozen orthodoxy. Many "religions" coexist there, and, among them, the devotees strengthen the ways of faith. Given the magnification of the combats - which is perhaps its more proper force-, religion has become the great scenario of the European-Western colonization and its intercultural contestation. Thus, against the ambivalences and evident failures of civilization and evangelization of local people, modern devices of domestication have been designed and applied seeking to weaken the sacrificial gestae. In this sense, the devices of Modernity reorient people to individual consumption, to Protestant asceticism and to multicultural aestheticism. But, behind all this formal politics, sacrificial gesta encourages popular (silent or tumultuous) uprisings and revolts, with fire always at hand, "alumbrando" (lighting candles) or burning. In spite of the colonization of the sacred relations and the reordering of faith, religious devotion is a dense, discontinuous and paradoxical fabric of powerful agencies and mystic gifts in Northern Argentina. ## III. RITUAL MATRICES AND TERRITORIES: THE OTHER SIDES OF REPRESENTATION In the following twelve statements, I present some notes in which our thought could delay an eternity. Although, on this occasion, due to space and time concerns, they will seem to remain as falling autumn leaves on the surface of my text, constituting a mere hazardous collected enumeration. 1. In Northern Argentina, local sacred agencies define, open up, and dig territories-other that enable archaic and anachronic ritual popular circuits and god names to emerge. 2. These sacred other territorialities constitute a relational field, which is alternative and parallel to the formal territory, and is expressed in whatever it has to do with local devotions. 3. Sacred images are, in each case, one particular image made of specific materials (wood, plaster, stone, iron; painted or dressed), and as each one tells the legendary stories of local devotions, it alters space-time. The often-repeated story is that the Virgin (or the Saint) has decided to stay there. For example, it was being transported on mule back, and the animal stayed there, in that locality, under that tree or by that rock, and there was no way of moving it away. In other cases, the image has appeared in a hole of the local topography: a grotto, or in the hollow of a trunk of an old tree (almost always an algarrobo, carob tree, autochthonous being, ancestrally surrounded by beliefs and rituals) as if it were springing from there. 4. People get "grace" or "suerte" ("luck") by touching the sacred image and "making him/herself to step" bending under it. There is always a direct contact, a non-sacramental inter-corpality, a metonymic touch, that inverts the imposed "spiritual", eidetic-theological order into a ritual semiopraxis (senses-in-the-intercorpal-course-of-action). The relationship covers any distance, in a round trip: one should "come back" to touch the sacred image, once during each visit, again and again. "Volver" ("to come back") marks the tempo of this relations and formalizes the local "structure of feeling" (Williams, 2000), named "añoranza" ("yeaning"), that is likewise the renovation and re-constellation of the whole encounter, each time, in situ. 5. The devotion consists of a "cyclical" celebration of the feast. But the devotees live and express that "cycle" like a "turn" ("la vuelta", "el volver") that has to do more with the "añoranza" ("yeaning"), a kind of nostalgia very attached to the natal earth (the "Pago"; from the Latin noun "pagus", and Greek "pagos") and its beings, than with the mere repetition of the calendar. "To return" is more related to that "structure of feeling" than to the geometric figure of the "cycle". The "turn" is always a "return", and it operates like a performative "turn" that "returns". That is to say: each return twists local forces of sense shuffling around the ritual plot, again and again, strengthening intense nodes, both new and archaic. 6. The sacred image is very powerful in the local community of beings that it involves, and in which it is involved. The Virgin (or the Saint) heals, saves and destroys. She (or He) is extremely dangerous, and requires proper treatment and a display of "respect" ("respeto"). Her (or his) power threatens and overflows the established "order of peace". But it is a power not of the Virgin (or the Saint) alone, but of the net that She (or He) summons and integrates. It is this cosmic community what makes it so powerful, and not the polarization in a geneetical or apocalyptic individual spirit. It is a mystical meeting and encounter in changing space-times, away from absolute beginnings and definitive endings. 7. The "feasts" are truly, as usually happens, "total great feasts" that involve ritual contact, economic mobilization, social effervescence, affective move, renovation of the collective local knots, erotic bloom, extension of new bonds, and expansion of the world. 8. An extended sacred immanence manifests and operates beyond (or rather, more over here) all Eidetic separation and anthropic (a trope into the trope: a double trope toward humans) delimitation, which are sustained high both by theological and pastoral discourses. Trees and leaves, animals, stones, hills, paper, wooden, stone or plaster images, cigarettes, candles and other objects, various atmospheric phenomena, expressions and the dramatic representations of human beings and animals and plants knit a irreducible ritual, metonymic interweaving, definitely resistant to any generalization or abstraction in a unique sinecedoquical trope. A renovated and vigorous "animism" (Latour, 1993; Latour & Venn, 2002; Haber, 2009; 2012; Grosso, 2009) trascends all local materiality. All these agencies operate from/ within/through a ritual practical matrix that impels action. 9. "Total feasts", then, adopt "show" dimensions, and the representative theatrical distance enables the scenic spot and restores, in absentia, the relationship with denied identities under the prevailing national, urban, Europhilic citizenship. The "Indians", dead, rest/residual of the "past", are represented in races, rhythms and dances. "Blacks" are ostensibly silenced, but can be listened to everywhere in their invisibility. If "Indians" are often visibly represented, "Blacks" are only listened to in musical percussion and salamanca stories. 10. "Spectacle" in devotion is a plot of torsions pressed by subaltern senses that re-appropriate the "public" character as a specific lithurgic element of Christianity. This Christian "publicity" constitutes a genealogical back-stage of the "publicity" as medieval and Renaissance "representation" of power, according to the classic study of Jürgen Habermas (Habermas, 1999). This Christian "publicity" was manifested (and now I refer to Foucault in Technologies of the Self; Foucault, 1988) both in the dramatics of penitence, invested by the testimonial force of the martyrs (Christian version of the antique exomologésis), and in verbal and written confession of faith that transports the salvation in a message ("gospel") for everybody while exposing the quality and brightness of the own thoughts to Other's surveillance, who is obeyed like a guide (Christian version of the antique exagoreusis) (Foucault, 1988). Therefore, the Enlightened "publicity" that magnetizes all the relationships toward the plot "Light - to say explicitly - public sphere" has a strong and unknown Christian side. In our postcolonial lands, that Christian-Enlightenment "publicity" battles in a popular great epic gesta against the sacred local forces of the "tenebrous" medium that never totally give its seminal darkness in which space-times others (are) gestate (Kusch, 1984; 1987; Grosso, 2014b; 2017b). In the popular devotions of Northern Argentina (and I have learned this as well in the Bolivian highlands and other Andean communities; and maybe it could be generalized to intercultural postcolonial relationships with the West) "publicity" allows - in dramatic representation, not in argumentative logic - the exposition of/to the "stratigraphy of violences" (Haber, 2011) which operates in everyday life, hidden below the weight and the robe of the imposed faith. This means: "Publicity" in Christian baroque dramatic confession rather than civic equalitarian homogeneous exposition. In that "publicity", "tenebrous" barbarians terrify "civilization". An ambivalent "publicity" that keeps other emotive economies of sense, more interactive than the rigorous Self-control and Self-domination of passions. The politics of Enlightened society are, in hetero-chronic manner, the main thing being fought over in this confrontation. Although public representation in citizenship school discourse is paradigmatically compressed to a naturalized consensus on modern values, morals and symbols, there is even a virtue in public Christian ritual representation as it allows spectrally dramatics of denied pagans identities and barbarian modes of make senses. 11. There are denied, silenced, inhibited, and rejected sense forces that appear profusely in devotions, transforming them into the more outstanding scenarios of inter-cultural relationships in our postcolonial territories. 12. Lastly, the ritual extension of agency in the local community of beings, and the dramatic re-motion of historical identities that spectrally walk across the feast, both open space-times other that abruptly jump into the sacred scenario. They make of the "anachronism" that weighs on these craftier manifestations of belief a politics of, and in, faith. Perhaps because belief is an evanescent way that tends –and takes to (and even rather maybe in reverse)- to welcome obscure and unspeakable ("inavouables") communities (Blanchot, 2016; Nancy, 2001; 2007; 2016; Grosso, 2012a; 2014a; 2014c; 2016a; 2017c; 2017d; 2017e). ## IV. WHEN OBLIVION SAVES I am talking about bodies, emotions, and about oblivion and denegation politics in intercultural postcolonial relationships. But I don't know exactly (and certainly not to what extent, even if definitely); I could be also talking about other postcolonial experiences and histories, about other diverse relationships in, and after, colonialism, from centuries ago. But I include, in my uncertainty, the suspicion that there isn't only one form of colonialism, but rather multiple ones that are different from the currently existing Occidental hegemonic colonialism. Perhaps I am also talking to some extent about other countries and experiences. Distant readers would know this better than me... What kind of familiarity is there between colonialisms? And resistances? I am writing here in palimpsest with a reference to Francis Bacon, who, for the first time and in his Essays (1597), used the Latin word "oblivion" in an English discourse. He did it in the trace of the Latin word. In this sense, I emphasize both "sides" of ancient "oblivion": that which covers all, and has its opposite in conscious memory; and the other, crawling over and through inside tenuous hells, which saves in silence (and in bodies) the matters in revolt, operating from there. I select this second sense, finding it in the "añoranza" (yearning) "structure of feeling", explicitly in Northern Argentine, but more extended in Latin American popular practices and sentiments. This sense relates to my expression "semiopraxis", that acknowledge senses-in-intercorpal-action: the senses embedding action in other languages than the logic-linguistic hegemonic one. Through Derrida, Heidegger and Nietzsche (and Kusch), in this random order, I will turn into oblivion intercultural post-colonial intercorpal cosmic counter-sense. I came across the unsuspected reading of Francis Bacon's *The Essays* as I was looking for the first time the term "oblivion" was used in an English expression, and, as I have said above, this happens for the first time in the Baconian text, in the late $15^{\text{th}}$ century. Then, reading the entry: *The Vicissitudes of Things*, the use of that word made me think of the main intervention of natural agents as oblivion agents. Bacon refers, primarily, to earthquakes, deluges, conflagrations, and great droughts as devastating elements that, although they always leave surviving rests, they submerge all in oblivion, and, since old times, it has always seemed (I quote Bacon:) "as if none had been left". Oblivion, then, Bacon says, always takes the figure of apparent novelty, like a merely blind and sweeping flux of movement, that nonetheless carries with itself sleeping histories in the revolted matter. Oblivion, therefore, covers and guards other histories. The Latin word "Oblivium", sicut Francis Edward Jackson (2005) in An Etymological Dictionary of Latin Language, edited in 1825, is a composition of two linguistic roots: on the one hand, "ob": that means "in the way of", "in front of", indicating an action that is done facing an antagonistic (op)position; and, on the other hand, "levis": that means "smooth", "which has been polished by taking away, or removing, in order to be straightened, flattened, leveled, smoothed". In its etymological roots, "livium" (in ob-livium) is associated with "lima": a file, an amend, "that which takes away what it seems inconvenient"; and with "limen": the threshold of a door, a (new) beginning (after polishing the place); and, thereafter, with "limes": a mark, a limit which indicates something terminated and left off. All these Latin expressions derive from the Greek ones: $\lambda \varepsilon \lambda \varepsilon \iota \mu \alpha \iota$ or $\lambda \varepsilon \lambda \varepsilon \iota \omega \mu \alpha \iota$ that mean "to smooth", "to polish". This smoothing, this flattening, oppressing, like the terror of the blank page, can be both the work of a natural or a social agent. Here we find the sediments of words and things like ashes, cinders, as the Latin "limo" says: the mud, the slime, "that which is left by waters after its sweeping pass". Oblivion includes both "sides" of this work: the one, which emerges to the surface covering all, and which has a positive antagonism in the conscious memory; the other, which, crawling over and through inside tenuous hells, saves in silence (and in earth and body) the matters in revolt, and remains operating in its repeated turns and returns from there. I call this second "side", this time in the case of oblivion, "semiopraxis". Oblivion follows trace. All traces erased always leave a (new, in palimpsest) trace. The erasure, the oblivion, belongs to the trace, fold under fold, print over print, cinders on cinders. There is no terrestrial being that could efface by any touch their footprints (Derrida, 2008: 162). A postcolonial bodies' discourse (which maybe goes through other colonial histories too, like I said above) is made of denials and erasures, and it hosts them in its terrified and labyrinthine bury of disruptive forces. Oblivion keeps histories in bodies. It makes-body. The dead interposes their blood, their flesh, their bones, their spectra. This is their gift of infinite corrosion in the scene of the darkest "pedagogical" bon/es/d. It is the lesson of oblivion. There is a turn, a re-turn, made by the vanquished under mono-logical, mono-thetical, hegemonic unique sense-of-reality (Benjamin, 2010; Grosso, 2014e). In the erased, annihilated, unknown beings and elements there is a nostalgic longing (in Northern Argentine Spanish called "añoranza"), pushing from there after: a pain of being there again, to come again. And it works inside any matter, folding over folds, printing in the back of print, pressing from erasure (Grosso, 2008a; 2012a; 2017d). Oblivion-pain returns within oblivion-pressure, and vice versa. A semiopraxis that involves senses-in-intercorporeal-action. "Intercorporeal" means here between (human and non-human) corps/corpus/bodies/masses. Oblivion makes-sense in diverse manners along the flux of action, in its becoming, and does it without searching logos expression. Oblivion keeps and holds. Its non-conscious "memory" (if there is one here as such) does its work in revolving matter: bodies and cosmic human and non-human beings (Grosso, 2009; 2012b; 2014d; 2016a; Vilca, 2010; 2017). In this dense and thick medium, what oblivion saves is not "memory" in the sense of bringing to the present. Oblivion is not the same that "forgetting", like that lost in the past. There is a non-linear continuity past-present-future operating in it; nor hermeneutical threads and texts where rather anachronistic encounters renew the scene. A semiopRACTICAL counter-narrativistic[^2] oblivion works in this piecemeal writing, which is a flashing, antagonistic, and thus - as scattered in number and massively opposite--: a collective one. As the intermittent lament and agonizing cries of their relatives (specially mothers) don't let all the absence at the foot of the glorious heroism and bombastic memory of the eidetic cult of State, the relation with dead emphasizes in this paradoxical way the linguistic constitution of what is impossible to say, blocked by the pain that bursts toward the unredeemed spectrum that press from behind oblivion (Arteaga, 2013). The strong links that join those bodies are more than conscious. Darkest forces revolt history and epistemology in dense and opaque oblivion's folds. Intercultural counter-narratives break down the minimum possibility of imposing a continued sense in a hermeneutic discourse (even if a diatopical one). A collective learning of other histories emerges in the silence of bodies' histories. Nor hermeneutic, neither reflexive, the oblivion makes sense in semiopRACTICAL tropes and refractions (Bajtin, 1999). The ancestors – vanquished under univocal episteme and ontology– with the living have collectively learned, not at all a new History as a mimetic transposition of powerful imposition of Present by the winners in logical narrative (De Certeau, 1985; Spivak, 1988: 263; Grosso, 2014d; 2017d), but a dislocation of theory from logos to semiopraxis (Grosso, 2017f), from reflection to refraction (Bajtin, 1999), and from convergent, mono-logical, univocal thinking and ontology to intercultural, cosmic conversation (Vilca, 2010; Haber, 2012; Grosso, 2016a; 2017a; 2017e). Semiopraxis opens to senses involved in intercorporal action: sinuous and devious senses, pulling and pushing, in frictions and stuggles, often silent and sometimes noisy. "The form is fluid, but the sense is so even more", Nietzsche said in the Genealogy of Moral (Nietzsche, 1985). In so doing, semiopraxis lets to work ("désoeuvre" is Maurice Blanchot and Jean-Luc Nancy's expression; Blanchot, 2016; Nancy, 2001) an epistemic alteration that both, it moves toward popular- intercultural-postcolonial bodies' and voices' drama, and cracks the colonial epistemic hegemony (Kusch, 1975; 1976; 1978; Grosso, 2008a). Postcolonial bodies' discourse is made by, and through, denials, ignorance, and erasures. That's why they break that naturalized order rubbing inland deaf and overlapping layers of silence, where tropes germinate. Bodies' discourse overflows toward intercultural derives, in baroque manners, and symbolic struggles immerse critical praxis in refused, deleted, annihilated, expired, buried, despised, and disqualified situations and relations. This drifting out and the unavoidable fights that splash mud and blood have been unknown by Social Theory in its distant and protected objectivist tradition, in spite of (or precisely because) their revolts under overwhelming knowledge policies, in the whispering shadows of History and Epistemology. Denial, effaces itself, host disruptive forces. Meanwhile, the decreasing of its powers (the most effective aim for ruling interests) is the counter-effect of the opposite, brightly recognition of that deep forces through biopolitical visibility: the weakening strategy of "putting-to-the-light". This is the reason why the reproductive continuity, again and again, once and another time, facing imperial eyes, strengths the colonial situation giving ground for immovable objectivism. Even do (may be, even more) when the objectivist frame is enabled by critical thinking and its best emancipatory intentions. Brightest acknowledgement hides and buries the dark forces of oblivion (Grosso, 2014b 2014d). Nearer, out of the linear continuity past-present-future, oblivion keeps into bodies, makes-body. From here, what cannot be said emerges: what interrupts speaking and normative grammatical writing, also what makes silence, what cries... Where do they save, the defeat, the impotence, the anger, the rage, the bitterness, the resentment, all the undeleted marks of torture, of massacre, of annihilation, of humiliation? Thither is a return in the erased experience: a yearning, longing, nostalgia, homesickness, "añoranza", and makes-sense, not "as such", but "playing" its proper game inside matter. I will explain this "as such" and this "play" alternative concepts in Heideggerian terms. I refer to Derrida's reading of many Heideggerian texts: Introduction to Metaphysics, Letter on Humanism, and Fundamental Concepts - 1929-1930 Seminar (Derrida, 2008). The showing fundament of the logos like the "as such" of the world: the "in front of" position, the "to have the world in front", out there and ahead, remains however trapped into the ambiguity of objectivity and belonging (Derrida, 2008: IV). The showing gesture becomes at the same time "master" and "slave" respect the "world": who shows is simultaneously who drives and who serves the world, because the world is "both the closest and the farthest thing". Who shows is separated and also immersed in both: to-having-world and not-to-having. In this last sense, he/she would be an "animal", in Heideggerian bias. Logos displays things and shows itself simultaneously, resting nevertheless in a marking index, which is not logos. Because marking "does not say, but indicates" (Heraclitean words) in a silence discourse. So, showing oscillates between cession and life, between the entity and the stay-in. Therefore, (in Nietzschean perspective, Derrida says:) "there is no 'as such' pure and simple". Heidegger has linked this oscillating ambiguity with a "pain of belonging": "Das Heimweh als die Grundstimmung". That is to say: the nostalgia as fundamental tone, the earth sentiment as a way-of-being, which is not a pure absence, nor "pure" absence at all. Rather, it "is-in-play", in the "between": oblivion-pain and oblivion-pressure oscillating (Derrida, 2008: IV). In intercultural postcolonial relationships, oblivion-made-body calculates another equation between memory and forgetting, which is dark for the light of saying, more specifically: for the logical coherence of the Historical narrative. The "historical materialist" (Walter Benjamin's expression in On the concept of history; Benjamin, 2010) is not a hermeneutist. Critical praxis is alien and antagonistic toward the intellectual field (evil that it would weigh to Bourdieu). Let us recall Marx himself in the Introduction to Hegel's Philosophy of Law (Marx, 2013). Critical praxis no matter with (re)telling History, but rather with antagonistic counter-narrativistic senses opening other histories, other relationships, by leaps, by turning back, by altering ritual matrixes of creation, by mythical reconstructions, by messianic cadences. There is a baroque folding of inside/outside, above/below, in front/behind, face/mask, now/then, cover/core, surface/ strata at that counter-narratives, that dislocate the usual and naturalized space/time references. This is the ground of/for/to reversing hospitality and, thereby, decolonizing justice. Oblivion, conceived as a mere inversion in a single line and in a one-dimensional frame, fits in detriment to the Nietzschean dislocation, and resists with obstinance in Platonic anamnesis, its neglected precedence of ideas –reactivated facing their "copies"—and whose differential distance is traveled by the logos of/in language. Definitely, this is the scheme that survives, in mere inversion. Thus, the possibility of Memory (which opens and increases in the deep of formal consubstantial and mimetical Art) results really there: behind, forgotten, but on the same side and in the same storyline of History. Although in this way the compound of oblivion-losgos-memory incorporates the jump from objectivist "representation" to the event of "unhiding", breaking thus all logical –and anyway, and at last– affirmative Hegelianism, it nevertheless reproduces the large thought continuity in "philosophical" "seeing-say" tradition. And, therefore, this jump, this decision, this practical shift, is still a "metaphysical" one, notwithstanding Heidegger move. That is, the metaphysics of the manifestation of the Being that is the old Truth hidden behind the appearance (of the entity as "representation"). Now, uprising and unveiling itself, not under losgos discovery by science force. The story changes from appearance/truth to unveiling/retreat. This "critical" turn comes to an agreement with the same monological discourse that questioned, without submitting and stating it as a problematic "as such". It is yet the traditional scene of "Being behind the entity", reversing the direction of the stream. Zarathustra has not been there, he went/goes through very far. Heideggerian "Nietzsche" has been caught in the petty authorship of his (decimononic, but anacronic) books. Nietzsche has been reduced to "Nietzsche, the last of the metaphysical philosophers in the history of Western metaphysics" (Heidegger, 2000).[^3] The Heideggerian photologism (Levinas, 1993; Derrida, 1989a), withdrawing from the non-ontological push of the vanquished as peremptory and delayed complot of dead and living, to the positive clarification of Being, reinterprets their fundamental undermining gesture, polarizing it in the supreme glow of the "will of power" as representation/tive of life. Perhaps the scope of biopolitics reaches this dark frontier. Thus, Heidegger includes Nietzsche in his "essential" - monological, monothetical and monotopical- style of criticism, and mobilizes his Heideggerianism of Being as "presence" that more illuminates, more hides, either just giving and/but jointly reserving itself. The force-of-oblivion, that presses on/from below representation, is an even stronger justice, in becoming impossible any visual, enlightened manifestation of its power in the (platonic) epistemological technology of eidetic screen. Justice is what rests hidden in that light, what pulls hidden back when illuminated. I emphasize the actions, the will, on the verbs: "presses", "rests hidden", "pulls hidden back", for the intervention, just there and so, of a force-of-sense. Justice comes from beyond (or from nearer; hither there is not the distance that loves Metaphysics) and extends beyond (or closer), opening up the monological monothetical discourse to the poetic "heteroglossia" (Voloshinov & Bajtin, 2009). Dancing, laughing, suffering and hoping in the band of the vanquished, who not stop waiting for, and not cease to give love to, and to believe in, their older/newer gods of heaven, earth and hell, this justice pushes the intercorporal senses that come from spectral force-of-oblivion. And, in that heteroglossical round, ones and others –alterous communities in the outskirts of History, Politics, and Culture– they meet in reverse hospitality. The problem with denial and oblivion (as forgetting) is its absorption in the same logic of History which domesticates justice, bringing it from the irreducible obliquity to fictitious "correctness". But, on the other hand (and band), otherwise, justice comes from others that do not dominate, obliquely and by refraction. The disrupted space/time and the broken discourse discontinuity by oblivion and denial forces are the working intercultural medium to this critical semiopraxis. In any way it is not the Same History, upside down or right. The oblivion drama, its scenic space of representation[^4], does not have the main purpose of take towards affirmative visibility, doing thereby (repressive and self-containing) "justice". Because such a "justice" requires, for its idealistic fulfilling, increasingly to emphasize and remark the border of the usual and naturalized "State-of-being" (Comarof & Comarof, 1991). These are the biopolitics of Memory, Truth and Justice, necessary in the Rule of Law and its daily states of exception, but insufficient in the vast infra-history justice reaches. Nowadays, in Northern Argentine, still (paradoxically in spite of recent re-ethnicization processes) dead-Indians, invisible-Blacks, erased-Cholos (Grosso, 2008a) living and surviving in the anachronistic element of intercultural ritual's matrixes of (re)creation, that drama of negation, denegation and oblivion twists the proper matter of the world while convoking all local spectra (nor mere matter, nor pure idea). All cinders, all traces, all rests touching the sense in that - and likewise other- mere-to-stay, no more, community. That is: elements, places, animals, minerals, plants, elements, gods, living and dead, old and new; they all carry their pain, their oppression, their annihilation, their power-of-negation, their joys, their hopes, their force-of-oblivion (Grosso, 2008a, 2012a; 2014d). The work of representation sets on the scene a postcolonial justice in which the "affirmation of life lets itself to turning back and to furrow by denial" (Derrida, 1989b: 321). No way to give back the remains to the formal monument (of Law, History, Tourism, in short: the "State-of-being" of the State; Grosso, 2014e) but to spread their proliferation getting impossible the containment of oblivion, and to spill them out of the limits that repress their otherness. The force-of-oblivion saves space-times-other that rest (un)active, and emerge in its surly medium in weaving other histories folding bodies. ## V. RITUAL MATRICES OF REVERSE HOSPITALITY "Semiopraxis" recognizes that, in our Latin American lands (and in the wider post-Eurocentric-colonialism), colonial and national hegemonic formations, and their logocentric discourses, have sunk into bodies, folding over folded, identities made in disqualification, stratification, effacement and denial. The postcolonial intercultural frameworks, along the length and breadth of this historical tortuosity, cannot be described from a position that draws the maps and other iconic configurations of the objective knowledge (not even the reflexive and critical objectivation to the mode of the Socioanalysis of Pierre Bourdieu), but at the (paradoxical) price of suspending the management of the senses by social (and non-social-human) actors in their struggles. The discourse of bodies can be approached, in all its baroque density and historical-political conflict, if the (un)social fabric of silences, denials and subalterns that constitutes us is recognized as the place of production of scientific practice. Many expressions and concepts produce by social sciences aid us in this way: "cultural struggles", "hidden polemics", "pluri-accentuations", and "symbolic fights", latent in the formations of "symbolic violence" in which we live. They are all sedimentations in ethnic and social practices, and arts-of-doing, differentiated and stratified. In our scrambled territories, the differences are not only those that are exposed, clearly inferior or excluded. There is also, and above all, invisibility, silence, self-censorship, self-denial, denial, ignorance, force-of-oblivion, dramatic night voices in bodies (Grosso 2008b; 2017g; 2017h; 2017i; Kusch 1983; 1976; de Friedemann, 1984; Bartolomé, 1996; Segato, 1991; Wade, 1997). When I arrived in 1986 at Santiago del Estero, in Northwest Argentina, to take up the chair of Philosophy of Culture at the National University and started to carry out fieldwork in the interior of the province, I was struck by how, in that vast dusty plain of low bush with gentle slide and slow rivers, a furious semiology was unleashed in every popular religious festival, and everywhere was flowing the omnipresence of music. In those years, I re-read, in a systematic way, the texts of Rodolfo Kusch (whom I had already known during the years of my initial formation in Buenos Aires).[^5] Then, the ritual relief of gesture as cultural mediation appeared in corpore to me, as a very significant socio-cultural key. Five years of fieldwork in Santiago del Estero, with some trips to Bolivia and Peru, made me go through a dense path of gestures, silences and languages from which I could not get out. Irreplaceable gift of reflective, critical and thinking ethnography. In 1993 I carried out an investigation in the North of Potosí, Bolivia, at the community of Bombori. There, many ritual circuits around a Saint Jacques ("Santiago"), performatively turned into an Andean god, with the scope that He has been "converted" (for the second time: now in outskirts of Christian faith) into the patron of the Bolivian shamans ("yatiris"), who meet annually in Bombori for the 25 of Julio. Gesture and ritual interaction is the field where a powerful ethno-cultural policy is unfolded. The cult evolves around "Tata Bombori": a "Santiago" one (whose current image appears to be actually that of San Cosme, or other "Spanish saint) that goes back, through local myths and legends, to the Conquest and the Colony. Associated with the hills ("mallkus") and with the lightning ("rayu"), He is submerged in the pre-Inca times of the Aymara lordships. The North Potosí region was the core of the great Charka Confederacy, constituted by five Aymaraspeaking ethnic groups which after falling under (first) Inca and (then) Spanish rule retained its recognition as a political unit. But, increasingly, the Qhishwa language was displacing the Aymara. One of the ethnic groups, the Qaraqara, dominated the region where at present the sanctuary is, with its ethnopolitical center in Macha, nowadays still organizational reference of the "ayllus" (communities) of the area. The ayllus annually congregate for May 3, The Day of Cross ("Crus P'unchay"), according to the old segmentary principle of organization (Platt, 1982; 1987). A territorial palimpsest inhabits calendar, devotions and histories.6 If we enter Bombori into the path of the pilgrims, we will observe a ritual circuit that circumscribes spaces, consecrates times, formalizes actions, and separates objects densely, symbolically charged. The performance of this ritual circulation highlights (as an equivocal way of saying) the communicative and practical mediation that gesture operates in the Andean world, where the politics of difference go through ways of doing, rather than through linguistic argumentation or ideological enunciation. When arriving at Bombori, the first thing that the pilgrims do is to visit the churches. In the new church, it is found the main image of Tata Bombori, transferred there from the old church since the late 1980s, under serious pressure by the parish priest of Macha. In the old church, the "aggregate" ("agregadas") images have been left. That is: those attached to accompany the principal one, and which had been brought later. Yet, despite the main image is not in the old church, the pilgrims go first to this. If the doors are closed (only during the month of July they remain open, daylight and nighttime), they kneel in front of them, "crying" ("pidiéndose": prayers and invocations amid sobs and tears, both, men and women) for a long time. The devotees make a kind of "sign of the cross" on their breasts, in the mode of a greeting, similar to the one performed by the peasants of the place when they face each other walking in the way: a vague circular drawing with the hand that crosses the face and the chest, and the head always bending over. If the doors are open, there are those who come in on their knees. Once inside, nobody should never turn his/her back on the Saints. Even still to retreat, everybody walks backwards or sideways. In a solemn gesture, hats ("sombreros", in the case of women) and wool bonnets ("ch'ulus") (men) are often been removed inside the church. Broadwise in front of the altar, there are candles lit on candelabra and iron tables. The devotees "ch'allan" (they make libations pouring drinks, serpentine and multicolored chopped paper), chew "coca" leaves ("akullikan"), smoke cigarettes, drink alcohol, burn incense... The murmur, the fume, the smell, the heat (the small enclosure has only a narrow chimney and a tiny window), all added to the beverage, coca and tobacco, lead to a dozing ecstatic mood. The pilgrims focus their devotion mainly to the tower ("el turri") of the old church. They sprinkle it by throwing in high, drink (alcohol, beer) and blood ("la ch'llan"). The tower, becoming thus "el turri-mallku" ("the tower-hill"), remains, from top to bottom, suffused in a mixture of coca, eggs, alcoholic drinks and, the most precious: blood, entrails and heads of animals, sacrificed at its foot, usually sheep or llamas. The bleeding is collected in an occasional container (metal, wood or plastic made of) and is thrown against the tower, forcefully, upwards. The entrails and heads are left for many days or weeks on the belfry, under the two bells, as a dead animal is left in the skirt of the hill to feed the "kuntur-mallku" ("condor-of-the-hill"). Undoubtedly "el turri-mallku" sprinkled with blood is the climax of the frictions of this Christian-Andeanized cult with the Christian communion that manages the Catholic Church. The rest of the animals are carried by the whole propitiating group (with its yatiri, if that is conducted by one) and are cooked without salt and without condiments. The common meal concludes with the deposit of the bones without breaking them, on the skirt of one of the three near elevations on the left of the tower, which is called "Tataj cielo" ("Father of sky"). The other two mounds are "sayris", and "asiru wayraña". "Tataj cielo" is a more solid construction, like a calvary, larger than the other two. "Sayris", or "Sayjata", are rocks a little higher up, at the top of the elevation, destined for "fiesta asuntus". From here, the gaze reaches the mountain Tanka Tanka, which is the more powerful mountain of the region (from below it can not be seen). Standing in "Sayris", the view links Tanta Tanka and "el turri". Finally, the third elevation: "asiru wayraña", named the "church of the devils". It is conical, rome and thick, by the river, and its slope facing "el turri" is planted with bones. Sometimes, the community of pilgrims with its yatiri bury the bones on the slope beneath "Tataj cielo" and make "ch'allas" over them. The "ch'allas" and the act of depositing the bones on the skirt, or of burying them, are denominated "to feed". This is preferably performed on Tuesdays and Fridays, but never on Monday, because it is the "dia de animas" ("day of souls", the dead). Instead, it is done throughout all July. "Tataj cielo", "sayris" and "asiru wayraña" are three "aviadores" ("that which provide the supplies"), from the colonial Spanish verb: "aviar", "to provide for the trip", "to give what is necessary for sustenance or for a qualified action". "Asiru wayraña" is "pña aviator" ("right side provider"), "qari" (male); "Tataj cielo" is "Iloq'e aviador" ("left provider"), "warmi" (woman); and "turri aviador" (also called "turri of the Lord" and "turri mallku") is "chaupi aviador" ("provider of the center"), and the most powerful. Perhaps "sayris", associated with "el turri aviador", constitute the point of mediation in the ritual trace Tanka Tanka - el turri. "Asiru wayraña", out of this tripod order, is a provider of trucks (metonymically called "Volvos", a brand of trucks), money, sheep, llamas and cows; while "Turri aviador" and "sayris" are providers of animals with ch'allas of eggs, candles, "korpas" (food based on meat), chicha ("fermented corn drink"), alcohol, wine, but with ch'alla of blood, gives more, also trucks. "Tataj cielo" is animals and health provider. These three "aviadores" associate and immerse, by ritual gesture, the Christian saint into the Andean cult of the hills. After three consecutive years, the pilgrims should offer a "misa". "Misa" is the well known liturgy celebrated by the priest in the new church, the Mass, but it is also the "mesa"7 ("table") that offers a yatiri with multiple ingredients, and, beside it, is also the total ritual performed by the latter to make getting the new truck to "suerte" ("luck"), that is: the "ch'allas". Three years accomplished, the pilgrim must offer a "Mass" celebrated by Catholic priests; meanwhile the others "misas" ("mesas") are performed on each pilgrimage. The participation of a priest for the feast on July 25th (and, if possible, for the entire month) is indispensable, because (in addition to the Mass) blessings, baptisms and processions require him. In the morning, at noon, and in the afternoon of the festive day, processions are performed with the main image of the Saint, only ever around the ancient church, walking in the opposite direction of the clock, among prayers, pyrotechnics and the cadentious march animated by a band of metals and percussion (omnipresent group in all Andean festivities). The procession leaves aside the new church and enclose the old one, passing by some crosses of the old cemetery that survive around it. Along the circuit, two stops are made, behind and in front of the ancient church. Then, the priest sprinkles blessings with holy water. It seems that the sprinkling during the procession and the Mass itself -inasmuch as "misa" is also the "mesa" ("table") offered by the yatiri- have been assimilated to the ch'allas, as the ones proper to Christian powers. Displacement of the senses and resignification are carried by the gesture in the very silence of the ritual action. Thus, "Tata Bombori", "Lord Santiago", is surrounded by these ritual circuits, among which are also different divinatory rites. The Saint is incorporated into a ritual framework with the deities of the hills, who embrace him, becoming all others. Perhaps the most notable enclave of this assemble is "the turri mallku", Christian and Andean at the same time, undecided. In the extended relational gesture, on the outside, all find each (in) other, nothing, or nobody, remaining equal or the Same. That is: the devote pilgrims-Tata Bomborikawallitu ("caballito", which is one the most important accompanying images in the old church)-turri mallkuyatiri-sayris-Tanka Tanka-Tataj cielo-asiru wayrañadiablus (diabolic beings)-kuntur mallku-"the stone split by the rayu"-cerru San Cosme-cerru Qilla Qilla (the last both, hills surrounding Bombori)-Bombori mayu (the Bombori river)-Santa Wara Wara (Saint Barbara, "el Luceru", the star Venus)... all this relations constituting a community of beings in an extensive and open gestographic network. This is a large and cosmic ritual tissue in the outskirts of culture, which huge hospitality in reverse recherche "suerte" ("luck"), and meet all beings out there, in the exteriority, as the more flexible and powerful politics without polis. Therefore, a barbarian hospitality receives outside, and goes out to find always joy in some difference, in becoming other among others. In a more extensive text (Grosso, 2017j), I talk (and write) about a gestographic ritual tetra-semiopraxis in Tata Bombori's cult, that involves rayu – cielo – diablus – cerru, and in which motley matrix the Lord Santiago is welcomed, and returns another among others. But, far from (en)closing this gestographic ritual tetrasemiopraxis in a structural scheme, I find an agency instability in a "diablus fund", collected, withdrawn and buried in "asiru wayraña", from which they operate with force-of-oblivion, from below, from the dead, stretching hands out towards the rayu, the cielo and the cerrus, and, among them, the Saint. Thus, diablus works with rayu, and the hills, and the kuntur mallku, and the Saint, in rites of divination; and with turri-mallku, and sayris, and Tanka Tanka, and the Saint, in the scattered and buried bones that "feed"; and with tataj cielo, and turri mallku, and all the others, in the ch'allas. Diablus operates like a lightning-from-bellow that sprinkles and makes tremble with its force all the ritual gestograma. But nobody replace any other, all are invoked in ritual tension searching "suerte" ("luck"). The "diablus fund" is an oblivion that (un)works ("desoeuvre"), always preceding from buried, from destroyed, from retired beings. An excess of hospitality in the exteriority, in the (un)measure that the mishearing and unknown beings are welcome, extending relations on a vast palimpsest where all ways carry their footprints, all traces erase others, all ashes integrate the new fuels, and all the fuels fires in the fire. An Andean print, in intercultural dispersion, on that old appreciation of Cicero, which says: "... (quamquam) id quidem infinitum est in hac urbe; quacumque enim ingredimur, in aliqua historia vestigium ponimus." (Cicero, 1914, Libro V, 4) (Although) this in effect is the infinite in this city (Rome): wherever, therefore, that we enter/walk, in any history we put footprints." "We put footprints": so much as we print there our new tracks ("we enter"), as much as we put our traces on the previous tracks that we find there ("we walk on"): we unveil/walk on the palimpsest. Traces on/over traces. A corporal-material discourse emerges from below, from the silent and laborious, just (un)working, oblivion. Olivia Harris (1989: 220) had said, again in the Andes, that the material remains of ancient populations (ruins, ceramics, treasures, burials) "are of great importance not only in the preservation of a collective memory of the past, but in maintaining a constant communication that past reactivates at certain moments in the life and in annual cycle." That is to say, they are not only "things", but they keep a ritual sense, they still exist for changing relations, they are mediations and touches of power in the search of "suerte" ("luck"). From oblivion, the ritual matrix reconstellated of a local community of beings, human and non-human, living and dead, gods and elements, does not deal with mere remains, but with remains that rest: they diminish, they repose, they re-turn, they (un)work, they do it undoing, they receive outside, where always all matter (nor chaos nor cosmos defined at all) awaits us. These rests are what just stay anymore, what was left, a semiopraxis from behind the bodies, a communication (common contact sensu, in hospitalary communities outside, in the always another difference), a disruptive communication that opens the justice of the others who non dominate, but play relations as perhaps the more archaic art of doing. The matricial plot is verse, groove, pathway, aperture, channel, lip, double event: mother and child, always two, never one, always more, always split, cut, multiple, in (re)constellation. The matrix tissue keeps (leaves and keeps) what is dark of the soil, dense, tight, enclosed, opaque, untouchable in its extensive thickness, stone blackness, tectonic handcraft, earth art, text, body, tomb, revolted earth, latent death, spectral dream, cosmic metamorphosis... San Fernando del Valle de Catamarca, 2024. [^2]: "nihilism"; _(p.7)_ [^3]: the "eternal return of the same"; _(p.7)_ [^4]: Throughout this text I used "representation" in two divergent senses. "Representation" as "putting-in-front" for the gaze of eyes is not the same as "representation" as dramatic inter-corporeal interaction (Derrida, 1989b). These two senses tune and match with Marxian differentiation between "theoretic objective relationship" and "practical objective action": static the first, and dynamic the second, which leads and pushes to critical praxis (Marx, 1985). The second sense is closer to what I call: "semiopraxis". _(p.7)_ [^5]: Rodolfo Kusch (1922-1979) radicalizes and places, in the postcolonial Latin American context (more specifically Andean and indigenous), the remission of scientific rationality and philosophical language to the geocultural horizon of the historical common sense of emergence and belonging that phenomenology was proposing. Kusch, thus, acknowledges, in meaning and action, a critical other "indigenous and popular" thinking in ancestral cultural logics of difference, and its derives in the realm of colonialism, both under Hispanic and (even) Republican rule. See Kusch 1983; 1986; 1975; 1976; 1978. _(p.8)_

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