*** This book is scheduled for release in April 2026.
Pre-order now for a discount! ***
Endorsements:
“From battlefields to hunting grounds, Of Enemies & Venison is a ravenous journey into the Aztec cosmotechnics of childbirth and sacrifice, of eroticism and blootletting, and of traps and camouflages, from which dangerous ambiguity emerges as a new paradigm for identification - all under the sign of a vengeful, double-headed deer." —Gabriele de Seta
“In this rigorous and quietly radical book, Lou Manuel Arsenault brings practical, moral, and metaphysical technique back to the centre of a multilinear deconstruction and reconstruction of our cosmological and technological orders. While Yuk Hui has shown that the metaphysics of technics emerges from a plurality of approaches and priorities within the metaphysical imagination, Arsenault reminds us that our material engagement with the world – with subjects and objects, humans and non-humans alike – is the key to escaping the clench of the calculatory mind and its monolithic structures of thought. To rethink technics becomes a question of “attaching oneself” once more, of restoring a presence in the world. The nexus between anthropological practices and self-enacting ontologies forms the book’s distinctive contribution: for the Aztecs, technics operates as a self-replicating relationship emerging through unstable subjects, rather than as changing relations developing from ontological fixity. As Arsenault himself observes, drawing on Latour: Imagination, by unifying sensibility and reason, becomes "productive" at the same time as it becomes practical.” — Luigi Monteanni
“Lou Manuel Arsenault is one of the most radical and groundbreaking voices in theory today.” — Alessandro Sbordoni
Blurb:
A new future for Mexico depends upon unearthing what colonialism has buried below the ground.
Situated deep within the ontological turn, this book brings together the philosophical anthropology of Descola and Viveiros de Castro, with the discourse that runs, through Heidegger, towards the world-building technics of Yuk Hui. Through a detailed study of the sacrificial and symbolic practices of Warfare & Hunting, Lou Manuel Arsenault uses these philosophies as tools to uncover a Cosmotechnic of the Aztecs.
In the cosmology and way of life of Nahuatl-speaking populations of the Valley of Mexico and the surrounding regions during the post-classical period, Warfare & Hunting were inseparable ritual practices within which the distinction between beings—Human, Jaguar, and Deer, or Aztec, Mimixcoa, or Mother and Enemy—became blurred. Articulated here as an Aztec Cosmo-Technique of identification, it is argued that these ritual practices enacted a world with its own destiny, one which was trampled by colonial violence. Yet this destiny—Batalla’s “Deep Mexico”—lies dormant, buried underground, buried in the literature, and in the archaeological record; this book works to unearth it.
About the author:
Lou Manuel Arsenault is Quebeco-Mexican Ph.D candidate at Institut national de la recherche scientifique, in Montréal. Working on the relationship between technology and our ways of thinking, his questioning here shifts to the civilizational terrain of Western technology’s domination over the rest of the world and its possible alternatives.
Of Enemies & Venison: First Materials for an Aztec Cosmotechnic (2026)
Author: Lou Manuel Arsenault
Afterword: Victor G. García Castañeda
Editors: 0nty, Alessandro Sbordoni, Claire Elise
Layout & Design: Becoming
Edition: 1st
Menge: 600 copies
Date: April 2026
CatNO: (Becoming)016A
ISBN: 978-9925-8207-5-7 (Print)
Language: English
Pages: 180
Printed & Bound by: Tallinn Book Printers, Estonia
Format: Softcover
Binding: Sewn Binding
Dimensions: 11cm x 18cm
Umschlag: 300g Munken Pure rough
Innen: 70g Holmen Book Cream
To be cited as:
Arsenault, L. M. (2026) Of Enemies & Venison: First Materials for an Aztec Cosmotechnic. Berlin/Nicosia: Becoming. 978-9925-8207-5-7.