Nature as a Political Subject: Sovereignty, Reciprocity, and Metamorphosis

Nature is not a backdrop. Nor is it a reservoir of resources to be managed, or a set of mechanisms to be deciphered. The three passages that follow—drawn from works where thought dares to reimagine the distribution of the sensible—pose it as a political question in the most radical sense: not as that upon which power is exercised, but as that which displaces its very terms. Each author proposes a path where the human is no longer the center, but one point among others in a web of relations. Their propositions do not cancel one another out; neither do they overlap. They trace lines that, without necessarily intersecting, open spaces where sovereignty, reciprocity, and metamorphosis become ways of thinking our belonging to the world.

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The utupë: The Infinity of Image-Essences

Davi Kopenawa does not speak of nature. He speaks of utupë, these primordial “images” that precede and found beings, entities, objects. The term is not a metaphor. It designates a reality that exceeds materiality while making it possible: the utupë are the auxiliary spirits, the xapiri, those invisible doubles that populate the Yanomami universe. Their status is not that of representation, but of a condition of existence. They do not represent the world; they are its very texture.

as auxiliary spirits xapiri, the primordial “images” (utupë) of beings, entities, and the most diverse objects (the universe of these image-essences is, by definition, infinite).

Infinity here is not a figure of speech. It is a constitutive property of the utupë: their multiplicity knows no limit, their diversity no end. They are not fragments of a whole, but singularities that, together, compose a universe where every element—human, animal, vegetal, mineral—finds its origin and persistence. Their sovereignty, if the term applies, does not stem from any right to be claimed. It is an ontological given: the utupë are not subject to the human; they precede and surpass it.

This primacy is not a hierarchy. It is a logical and existential anteriority. The utupë do not govern; they make possible. Their infinity is not a closed totality, but a permanent openness. They are not subjects in the modern juridical or political sense, but presences that structure the world without allowing themselves to be reduced to human categories. Their status is not that of a partner with whom to negotiate, but of a condition of possibility for any negotiation.

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Schemata of Exchange: Reciprocity as Relation

Philippe Descola does not speak of rights, nor of sovereignty. He speaks of relations of exchange, of schemata that organize the connections between humans and non-humans. These schemata are not contracts, nor agreements. They are ways of being in the world where exchange is not a transaction, but a modality of cohabitation. The Tukano and the Campa, among others, do not see their environment as a set of resources to exploit. They perceive it as a fabric of relations where every act—giving, receiving, returning—engages a reciprocity that exceeds mere equivalence.

The same can be said of the exchange relations the Tukano weave among themselves and with their environment, or of the gift-giving schema that preferentially orients the actions of the Campa and some of the non-humans with whom they cohabit.

The “gift-giving schema” is not a moral rule. It is an orientation of action, a preference that structures interactions. It is not a matter of giving in order to receive, but of giving because the world is made of gifts. Non-humans—animals, plants, rivers—are not passive objects. They are active participants in these exchanges, partners whose actions respond to those of humans. Reciprocity is not an ideal; it is a condition of survival.

This relation is not symmetrical in the sense that a contractual logic would understand. It is asymmetrical by nature: the giver and the receiver occupy positions that are not interchangeable. The gift-giving schema is not an equality, but a mutual dependence. It does not assume an identity between humans and non-humans, but a continuity in modes of exchange. Here, nature is not a sovereign subject. It is an ensemble of partners with whom humans maintain ties that cannot be reduced to utility or domination.

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Nutrition: The Instability of Forms

Emanuele Coccia speaks neither of rights nor of reciprocity. He speaks of nutrition, of that self-evidence which reveals the impossibility of fixing the form of the living. Nutrition is not one biological mechanism among others. It is the proof that form—this individual and specific identity we attribute to beings—has nothing substantial about it. It is not autonomous, nor essential. It is traversed by what nourishes it, by what transforms it.

Nutrition is the evidence of the impossibility of considering the form that informs the living—in its individual and specific identity—as something substantial, autonomous, and above all essential, intrinsically inscribed in the life that traverses it.

Form, here, is not a stable given. It is a process, a permanent metamorphosis. Nutrition is not a mere transfer of matter. It is an incorporation that blurs the boundaries between self and other, between inside and outside. To eat is to take into oneself what is not oneself, to transform the other into part of oneself. But this transformation is not unilateral. It is reciprocal: what is incorporated in turn modifies the one who incorporates it.

This instability is not a weakness. It is a condition of the living. Form is not a given, but a becoming. It is not an identity, but a relation. In this perspective, nature is not an ensemble of fixed beings, but a flux where each individual is but an ephemeral expression. The human is not a center, but a moment in this flux. Its sovereignty, if it has any, is not that of an autonomous subject, but that of a passage.

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Three Regimes for a Single Question

These three voices do not answer one another. Nor do they contradict. They propose three ways of thinking nature as a political subject—not in the sense that it would be endowed with rights or will, but in the sense that it displaces the very terms of politics.

Davi Kopenawa posits the utupë as an infinity of image-essences that precede and exceed all material form. Their sovereignty is not a claim, but a given: they are the condition of possibility for the world. Philippe Descola describes schemata of exchange where reciprocity is not a rule, but a way of being in the world. Nature is not an object there, but an ensemble of partners with whom humans maintain relations that cannot be reduced to utility. Emanuele Coccia, finally, shows that nutrition reveals the constitutive instability of living forms. Nature is not an ensemble of fixed beings, but a flux where the human is but an ephemeral expression.

Their common ground, if there is one, is not a shared thesis. It is a single operation: shifting the gaze. Not toward some elsewhere, but toward what is already here, yet rendered invisible by our categories. The utupë are not distant spirits; they are the very fabric of the world. The schemata of exchange are not exotic customs; they are ways of living together. Nutrition is not a biological detail; it is the proof that form is never fixed.

These three propositions do not complement one another. Nor do they oppose. They trace lines that, without converging, open spaces where nature ceases to be an object to become a question—a political question, in that it engages our way of inhabiting the world.