Relational Care contra Nihilism: An Exploration alongside Amazonian Kichwa Thinking

This article engages the Nietzschean problem of nihilism from a “cross-cultural”, comparative vantage-point. In Nietzsche’s diagnosis of the “sickness” of nihilism, the measure of that illness is taken with reference to a particular conception of health – rooted in Nietzsche’s relational ontology of the will to power. Here, instead, I wish to take the possible nature and entailments of relationality as an open question to be pursued in conversation with Indigenous American and especially Amazonian Kichwa thinking. Doing so, I argue, allows for a distinctive kind of gloss on how we might think about what is impoverishing in nihilism, and also opens distinctive horizons for exploring what it might mean to live otherwise, to pursue health. To explore how this may be so, I focus on the question of power and how power is experienced as relating to the self – both within nihilism and within Kichwa relational thought and practice. Drawing on classical and recent explorations of nihilism’s symptoms, I try to show how orienting ourselves in conversation with Kichwa relationality yields a kind of medicine – a possibility and an invitation for worlding-otherwise – that is adeptly suited to the illness we must grapple with today in the shadow of interrelated social and ecological breakdowns