“Cosmophobia": A Counter-Colonial Hermeneutic of the Emotions of the Conquestocene

In this paper we propose to analyse, deepen and highlight the analytical, hermeneutic and critical power of the concept of 'cosmophobia' proposed by Antônio Bispo Dos Santos as a diagnostic category of white colonial culture. With this concept, Nego Bispo - a political and intellectual leader of the Brazilian quilombola communities - opens up the possibility of radically subverting the perspectives of approaching the universes of human perceptions, emotions and feelings in the face of the climatic and ecological-political catastrophe of Holocene death.

The notion of 'cosmophobia' reverses the ontological-political genealogy between emotions and environmental catastrophe. Instead of seeing the latter as the cause of a wide variety and heterogeneity of emotional impacts on different classes of human populations, it invites us to consider a particular geo-culturally specific psycho-emotional and socio-affective disorder (fear and mistrust of the Other) as the root trigger of the geo-socio-metabolic disorders and disturbances of the present. This also implies a radical inversion of the trajectory and perceptual temporality of catastrophe: while for vast populations socialised within the noosphere and technosphere of modern urban-industrial socio-metabolic dynamics, environmental catastrophe is 'what is to come', for populations that are victims of the eco-genocidal violence of colonialism, slavery and extractivism, catastrophe is a historical-structural event that refers to the originary conquest. Likewise, in contrast to perspectives that focus on the sphere of 'individual perceptions and emotions' as the locus of 'pathos', the notion of cosmophobia prioritises and gives relevance to the sphere of collective relations and vincularities, as a spatio-temporality of re-existence and healing.