ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the precarious nature of the newly emerging sovereign state during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It analyses how the state is constituted by the discourses of salvation that materialise from the legal, economic and scientific narratives of the time. Particular attention is paid to how the construction of these narratives relied heavily on the myth of a savage past, upon which the Old World grounded its birth into modernity. Even today, reliance on Freud’s theories on totem and taboo, Marx’s primitive accumulation, Hegel’s spirit, Locke’s social contract, Hobbe’s state of nature: all of these myths fetishise the New World as the primitive Other. The savage nature of the New World thus provides the Old World with its origin.1 The aim of this chapter is to look beyond these myths of worldly origins to the processes that hold these divisionary realities in place.
