Reading Room ♯51 Eszter Nemethi

Practicalities:

When? 2026-06-18, from 18:00 to 20:30.
Where? Agency.

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Short summary: For this reading room, organized as always in partnership with Jubilee, theatre maker and researcher Eszter Némethi has choosen “Cannibal Metaphysics” by Eduardo Viveiros de Castro.

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Description:

Eszter Némethi writes:

Eduardo Viveiros de Castro's Cannibal Metaphysics is a difficult book. I mean that here as a recommendation. It requires slowing down, rereading, and ideally other people. I first came across it through the School of Magical Politics, an artistic research platform I have been developing for some years, where we read excerpts alongside Ailton Krenak and in the wake of thinking about magical realism and the pushback against it within American literatures and thought.

Viveiros de Castro insists that what he calls Amerindian thought constitutes not a mythology to be interpreted but a philosophy to be taken seriously on its own terms. The book is brilliant, and it is also a reckoning with the ethics of anthropology, with what it means for different epistemologies to come into genuine relation.

I chose it for this reading room because it keeps returning me to a question that has been central to my practice for over a decade: how do I hold (onto) other people's ideas? Not absorb or translate them into something more familiar, but actually hold them with their distance, with the right friction. That is also, I think, what a reading groups can do that a solo reader cannot. This is the invitation.

Join us to (slowly) read excerpts selected by Eszter. Bites provided.

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Guest(s): Eszter Nemethi

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Library document(s) selected: Cannibal Metaphysics