ABSTRACT
Previous chapters have sought to demonstrate how the First World and a particular form of individual subjectivity can be traced back to the crisis experienced by the embodiment of the medieval Christian Church in western Europe upon its discovery of the New World. This crisis can arguably be said to have produced a dramatic shift in the perception by western Europe of its own identity such that it was able to assume for itself the authority to discharge the debt that had been preventing it, the Christian world, from achieving salvation. In assuming this new identity the Old World positioned itself in the divine space of a future-perfect present, while casting the New World into the fallen state of unredeemed sin. In this way, Old World peoples were able to assert themselves as the chosen ones, complete and fully redeemed, while constructing New World peoples as underdeveloped. The Old World continued to secure this ostensibly superior identity by violently colonising the New World in a way that fetishised the New World as the source of Old World desires. The constitution of the New World existed necessarily as a space that resisted complete incorporation into the Christian body such that it remained marked as a space of savagery and barbarism. By imagining the New World in this way, the Old World was able to assure itself that a totalising embodiment of a united Christian world was not impossible but still partly unredeemed. This hope of global redemption had become the new object of faith but not one that was taken seriously because to do so would require the sacrifice by the Old World of its unique identity of assumed superiority. The Old World becomes, in effect, a ‘unity somehow prematurely stopped’.1
