The following article by Andrés Guerrero is an unedited translation of the sixth and final chapter of his recent book, Administración de poblaciones, ventriloquía, y transescritura (Admini stration of Populations, Ventriloquism, and Trans-writing, 2010), a remarkable text of political history and philosophy that has been largely inaccessible to readers outside the Andean region. 1 Our publication of that chapter in this issue, with commentaries on it and an interview with the author, reflects the unusually loud “echoes” (to use a Guerreroism) we heard in it of Focaal’s efforts to promote unorthodox ways of addressing the global and historical composition of political critique. Extracting a chapter such as this from its source cannot but leave scars. Here we aim to fill in some of the missing pieces to the story that follows.