Rhythm, contagion, "cosmic race”

Abstract

In his text Pitágoras. Una teoría del ritmo (1921), the Mexican philosopher José Vasconcelos carries out an interesting rereading of ancient Pythagoreanism to reorient the symbolic-abstract direction of Western thought, which seems to pave a new line of genealogical exploration of the question of mimesis in a postcolonial context. The aesthetic notion of rhythm, as well as shifting the discourse on mimesis from the visual to the acoustic-emotional dimension, nevertheless presents the characteristics and risks of what Scheler calls “unipathy” or contagion and acquires a particularly important significance when considered as the theoretical premise of the famous Vasconcelian essay The Cosmic Race (1925). This article reconstructs the link between the notions of rhythm, contagion and “cosmic race” to reflect on the question of otherness, on the mimetic-rhythmic processes of the individual and socio-political body, and on the risk of the “desymbolisation” of thought that such a process perhaps conceals.

Keywords

• rhythm
• contagion
• mestizaje
• race
• mimesis
• post-colonial