Over our dead bodies: The death project, egoism and the existential dimensions of decolonization

This chapter revolves around the existential dimensions of the decolonization of whites with a specific focus on Denmark. The colonial, capitalist, racist, patriarchal world demands our existential commitment by separating ourselves from Mother World, and to disassociate from each other. This disconnection is closely linked to the disease of egoism (Organizaciones Indígenas de Colombia): the particular practices and historical choices that each person makes following coloniality’s prescriptions, which add up to become the death project. The death project speaks to the structural enforcement of the prescriptions of the coloniality of power. Such structural enforcement, however, is impossible without the existential, where we reduce our bodies to machines, stripping us from sociality and relationality. To the extent that we reduce our bodies to our own life-time, and to labor-power within a system that values us only in terms of our contribution to the labor market; then our bodies are already diseased. To realize our diseased bodies is to reinsert ourselves into the world as part of its processes of becoming. The ‘magic’ that was taken out of our bodies and practices of relating to one another during the witch hunt (Federici), consists in the world-making (Lugones) that can now take place over our dead bodies.