This contribution to the special issue of 'Arena Journal' on the question of 'humanity: surplus to requirements' revisits the arguments of Pierre Clastres, a French anthropologist who studied with Claude Levi-Strauss and died prematurely at the age of forty-three in a car accident. Clastres worked in the subfield of political anthropology and his main contributions to the literature were through a series of essays, collected under the titles 'Archaeology of Violence' and 'Society against the…
