The Crisis of Messianic Philosophy

Matriarchal Anthropophagy Devours Modernity

Abstract

Based on some aspects of Oswald de Andrade’s thesis A crise da filosofia messiânica (“The crisis of messianic philosophy”), this essay will try to show certain affinities between his deviant method and that of the German philosopher Walter Benjamin. Some of elements developed here will be the resource of both to the transhistorical perspective of the Swiss writer J. J. Bachofen (in his major work Mother Right), their contrasting relation with the idea of messianism, the orientation of their philosophies of history towards the past and some of their contemporary consequences, such as the synthesis figure of the cyborg as developed by Donna Haraway.