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233 23 Scriptures Without Letters, Subversions of Pictography, Signifyin(g) Alphabetical Writing José Rabasa I define myself as a Mexican atheist. With such identification I seek to underscore a long history of atheism in Mexico (particularly pertinent to the magistrate), which in my case I trace to a filiation with an anarcho-communist tradition that includes the names of Ricardo Flores Magón, Antonio Gramsci, Walter Benjamin , Antonio Negri, and Alain Badiou. This legacy leaves room for maneuvering outside the narrow antireligious vein that has dominated anarchism and communism. I seek to respond to—or better, expand—on a certain critique of subaltern studies.1 Instead of working with assumptions that subalterns embody a revolutionary consciousness, subalterns are most often, at least in Gramsci, not the ideal subjects that subalternist theoreticians assume. I raise the specter of subalterns persecuting, banishing, and murdering other subalterns for religious reasons. If Gramsci would have solved the problem by insisting on a solid dose of science, we may find such a solution naïve today. My affiliation with atheism is perhaps more methodological than a statement of belief. Whereas I entertain questions of messianicity as posed by Walter Benjamin and Jacques Derrida, and welcome Alain Badiou’s reflections on Saint Paul, I have no sentimental attachments to universal understandings of God that would absorb all expressions of spirituality as partaking of one and the same ultimate supernatural reality (read: the Greco-Abrahamic tradition and the phenomenon of globalatinization , which flattens out cultural differences in the application of such concepts as the sacred, ritual, sacrifice, religion, God, etc.).2 Given that my work concerns itself with Amerindian cultures, in particular with the Nahuas of central Mexico, the suspension of belief in God will keep me from imposing or even assuming a particular understanding of the supernatural as universal—let alone the no-less violent reduction of all Mesoamerican culture to idolatry. I will return to the question of idolatry at the end of this essay. In what follows, I want to suggest lines of research on Mesoamerican encounters with Christianity and the written word that could be illuminated by and carried out under Vincent Wimbush’s proposal for the Institute for Signifying Scriptures (ISS). José Rabasa 234 The Franciscan friar Bernardino de Sahagún wrote the following assessment of pictographic writing in one of his prologues to the Historia General de las Cosas de la Nueva España: This people did not have letters or any characters. They communicated with one another by means of representations and paintings. And all their ancient customs and books they had about them were painted with figures and representations in such a way that they knew and had records of the things their ancestors had done and had left more than a thousand years ago, before the Spaniards had come to this land. Most of these books and writings were burned when the other idolatrous things were destroyed. But many remained hidden, for we have seen them. And, even now, they are kept; through them we have understood their ancient customs.3 This passage lends itself to at least two possible readings. One can put the emphasis on the negation that Amerindians had any form of writing and thus see Sahagún as exercising power by denying them writing. The arguments that Native Americans were people without writing lent support to the view that they were less human, much in the same way that the eighteenth century drew the distinction between peoples with and without history. But I am not sure the analogy works. There is no indication that the Nahuas of Central Mexico internalized the denial of writing. I will return to this question later. For now I would like to give more weight to the second part of the passage, where Sahagún states that the Nahuas had writings. The term he uses in Spanish is escrituras. I propose that we must understand how power was exercised in the sixteenth century not in the denial that Nahuas had writing, but rather in the implicit recognition that the Nahuas did have a system of writing. Let us first attend to what is meant by escrituras in the sixteenth century. In the Tesoro de la lengua castellana o española, the first dictionary of the Spanish language published in Madrid in 1611, Sebastián de Covarrubias provides three definitions under “escritura”: 1) in the most general sense, escritura stands for “that which is written”; 2) escritura pública is...

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