Acosta is significant because:

of his role in the emergence of Homo racialis (bearers of racial character)

- part of colonial and subduing the Americas
- beginning gestures of scientific classification of the human. The final moment of
the split between the hard and soft sciences. Claims lodged with in a history of
nature itself
--Historia natural y moral de las indias
- gives us a glimpse into the role of Christian theology in coloniality and race
How the intellectuals of the 16th century consolidated what happened in the Iberian
project. To reckon with raciality and coloniality and simultaneously, science. Acosta
is in the shift from Catholic south to Protestant north. Acosta is trying to hold the
soft (humanities)and hard sciences together. The split suppressed the theological.
This is where modern science is born. The split was taken up by the Enlightenment,
to critique, to found reason on sure grounds. The racial imagination is the
architecture suppressed in the modern scientific imagination.
Homo racialis Language Social order [Kant]
- Reason is a social arrangement
- as scientific is religious and as religious is racial
- imperial containment in Europe is the analogy of the non-Jew outside Europe
New World Slavery, 9/11, modern religious, theological as Global imaginary
{Race Religion and Literature} Anijar
The Blood Laws
Christianity is being rooted on the bloodlines of Europe. Different blood is being
banished from Christianity. Theology is not the difference but raciality. The Jew is a
racial/religious body to be compared with the European to then be compared to the
rest of the world. Race is being constituted as a religio-scientific imaginary. In Kant,
the theological architecture is suppressed in his attempt to be scientific.
Jose de Acosta
- Spanish Jesuit 1514-1600
- 100 years after Columbus and the Modern World System
- Interested in the debate about the colonial project between De las casas and
Sepulveda
- Enters the scientific enterprise for missionary work
- Language as the index of culture and civilization
- Sepulveda says Indians are Aristotles natural slave, De las Casas says they are
human. Las Casas says there are different levels of language and social order and
civilization. Biology is being hinged to culture through language. Literature attests to

the ability to control nature.

- Acosta levels of civilization. Christianity is a civilizing mission. The Americas are
understood with in Nature its self but this teleogical arch is the unfolding of the
West.
Three types:
1. True reason, cities, commerce, most important the knowledge and use of letters.
There the people are more civilized and more human. Chinese.
2. European influenced, strayed form the right use of reason. Must be conquered
through reason. No writing of philosophy and rights but have leaders and
governance. Some order of worship. No writing but ingenuity seen in memory
devices, calendars etc.
3. Like wild animals without law or government. In the new world there is an
infinite number of this last class.
Civility is tied to the European supremacy and the presence of a linguistic order
Second part of the book
- the Scientific apparatus
- linguistic technologies inscribe the Indian into the European telos
We must imagine ourselves beyond ourselves rather than render others in
reference to us.