Latin American Philosophy from Identity to Radical Exteriority 0253012481, 9780253012487

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LATIN AMERICAN PHILOSOPHY FROM IDENTITY TO RADICAL EXTERIORITY

WOR L D PH I L O S OPH I E S Bret W. Davis, D. A. Masolo, and Alejandro Vallega, editors

LATIN AMERICAN PHILOSOPHY FROM IDENTITY TO RADICAL EXTERIORITY

ALEJANDRO A. VALLEGA

INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS Bloomington and Indianapolis

This book is a publication of Indiana University Press Office of Scholarly Publishing Herman B Wells Library 350 1320 East 10th Street Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA iupress.indiana.edu Telephone 800-842-6796 Fax 812-855-7931 © 2014 by Alejandro Arturo Vallega All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses’ Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition. ∞ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48–1992. Manufactured in the United States of America Cataloging information is available from the Library of Congress ISBN 978-0-253-01248-7 (cloth) ISBN 978-0-253-01257-9 (paperback) ISBN 978-0-253-01265-4 (ebook) 1 2 3 4 5 19 18 17 16 15 14

A mi padre Gino y en memoria de mi madre Patricia

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C ON T E N T S

Acknowledgments ix Introduction 1 PART 1 . Identity, Dependency, and the Project of Liberation 1. The Question of a Latin American Philosophy and Its Identity: Simón Bolívar and Leopoldo Zea 19 2. Existence and Dependency: Ernesto Mayz Vallenilla’s Phenomenological Analysis of Being Latin American and Augusto Salazar Bondy’s Negative Critique of Latin American Philosophy 36 3. Latin American Philosophy and Liberation: Enrique Dussel’s Project of a Philosophy of Liberation 52 4. Delimitations . . . of Dussel’s Philosophy of Liberation and Beyond 76 PART 2 . The Decolonial Turn and the Dissemination of Philosophies 5. Beyond the Domination of the “Coloniality of Power and Knowledge”: Latin America’s Living Ana-Chronic Temporality and the Dissemination of Philosophy 99 6. Remaining with the Decolonial Turn: Race and the Limits of the Social-Political Historical Critique in Latin American Thought 120 PART 3 . Thinking from Radical Exteriority 7. Yucatán: Thought Situated in Radical Exteriority as a Thinking of Concrete Fluid Singularities 139

8. Modernity and Rationality Rethought in Light of Latin American Radical Exteriority and Asymmetric Temporality: Hybrid Thinking in Santiago Castro-Gómez 151 9. Thinking in Remarkable Distinctness: Decolonial Thought in Some Key Figures in Contemporary Latin American Philosophy 172 10. Fecund Undercurrents: On the Aesthetic Dimension of Latin American and Decolonial Thought 196

Notes 219 Bibliography Index 275

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AC K NOW L E D G M E N T S

I wish to thank those whose conversation and critical thought have sustained the tension of this work: Ramón Grosfoguel, Enrique Dussel and his students at the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana (UAM) and at the UNAM, Santiago Castro-Gómez at the Javeriana in Colombia, Hernando Estevez, Jason Winfree, Gino Vallega, Marcelo Caracoche, Michael Stern, Cristian Amigo, Jesus Sepúlveda, Claudia Baracchi, Françoise Dastur, David Krell, James Risser, John Sallis, Jerry Sallis, and Charles Scott. I should thank Ofelia Schutte. Omar Rivera’s reading of the manuscript in its final stages made for a much stronger book. Kira Bennett Hamilton’s detailed editing added sharpness and clarity. I should also mention the past years’ presentations and discussions at the Collegium Phänomenologicum in Cittá di Castello, Italy, and at the Center for Study and Investigation for Global Dialogues’ Decolonial Summer School in Tarragona and Barcelona, Spain. This book owes much to Daniela Vallega-Neu’s critical and patient discussion throughout its composition in its various parts, as well as to her close reading of the final manuscript and her insightful and always clarifying comments and corrections.

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LATIN AMERICAN PHILOSOPHY FROM IDENTITY TO RADICAL EXTERIORITY

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Introduction

Latin American Philosophy Only what is difficult can sustain thought. Today in philosophy one of these difficulties comes from the end of a myth that took philosophy as the child of Western rationalism, with its origins in Greek thought. Philosophy today is changing; the field of philosophy is undergoing a new dawn with the formation and inclusion of world philosophies that bear origins, experiences, overlappings, encroachments, and transformations well beyond the modern North American and European traditions. The new world philosophies open possibilities of unfathomable and fecund thinking as one engages and is exposed to unbridled senses of existence, to lineages, configurations of lives, memories, losses, and expressions that in their singularities and interplay do not correspond to what philosophy was once imagined to be (in its modern Western forms and dispositions). This is the case “historically” as well as in terms of contemporary cultural world migrations. One nascent field in the development of this broader philosophical consciousness is Latin American thought. This book introduces philosophy in Latin America in a radical and transformative sense that reopens the question of how philosophy may be conceived and understood. A book on Latin American philosophy is a difficult task. The field being addressed is as broad and complex as any other in the study of philosophy. Moreover, given its history Latin American philosophy presents further complications of its own. Latin American thought is inseparable from Western philosophy by virtue of colonial history. As a result, it entails an interpretative reception of Western philosophy and ultimately its transformation and peculiar uses in the Latin American context. Furthermore, Latin American philosophy is influenced in important ways by Islamic, Jewish, and African traditions and thought. Also, in the last twenty years Latin America has seen the resurfacing of indigenous cultures. Indigenous thought, once thought decimated by colonization, has reap-

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2 | Latin American Philosophy from Identity to Radical Exteriority peared to enrich and contribute to a new horizon for Latin American social, political, economic, and existential consciousness. Lastly, Latino/Latina philosophy in North America, although distinct from Latin American philosophy, is in many ways continuous with the latter, not only culturally but because of the tasks of decolonial praxis and liberation from Western hegemonic systems of power. (I will say more about this in the last section of this introduction.) The introduction of philosophy in Latin America is complicated further by the extremely limited information on the field available to English-speaking readers. Until ten years ago just one Latin American philosophy reader existed, and today one may count but a few more.1 Furthermore, most of the material necessary for pursuing serious, in-depth scholarship on the field remains untranslated. The context of possible reception also plays a complicated role. With the transformations of philosophy in North American and European thought, gender studies, race theory, queer theory, comparative studies, and cultural critique (just to mention a few approaches) have developed concerns with distinct issues from Western perspectives, which do not necessarily correspond with those that occupy Latin American philosophers. In order to understand the complexity of philosophy in Latin America, one also needs to have some sense of its distinct history. The history of Latin America and its philosophy is marked by the invasion and colonization in the sixteenth century of the continents we know today as the Americas. Therefore Latin American philosophy has as a critical point of departure the events that begin with the arrival of the conquistadors in 1492; at the same time, it concerns not only the ways of thinking that have followed colonization but also ways of thinking that preceded colonization. Moreover, the United States’ political, military, and economic expansionism from the era of Manifest Destiny to date has repeated the pattern of violent economic and military oppression of Central and South America again and again, continuing the path of European coloniality. Thus, philosophy in Latin America in the last hundred years is distinguished by its struggle first for liberation and self-identification and later on for decolonization, for recovering and giving articulation to lives and ways of thinking that have been suppressed, silenced, or virtually destroyed. As the discussions in chapters 3 through 6 show, Latin American philosophy of liberation and decolonial philosophy are born of the living experience and modes of knowledge, the lineages and histories, of the excluded, the poor, the exploited, and the silenced. As a result they concern ways of thinking that are exterior to hegemonic North American and European philosophical traditions and their ways of comprehending existence. To speak of Latin American thought in its struggle for liberation means to engage more than five hundred years of attempts to articulate senses of identity with an irreparable and fecund sense of difference that ultimately remains beyond total Western comprehension, manipulation, determination, and

Introduction | 3 production. Indeed, the definitive insight that led me to write this book was not that Latin America has suffered and continues to suffer under Western hegemonic modernity and its system of power and knowledge (undeniable and pressing truths) but that the “modern Western rationalist and instrumental” interpretation of the world is insufficient to address the experiences of being Latin American and the thought that arises from it.2 (Here and below, in order to identify and introduce key technical terms for my discussion, I place them between quotation marks and add an explanatory footnote at the end of the sentence.) By speaking of modern Western instrumental rationalism, I mean to point to the kind of thinking that accompanies the unfolding of capitalism, colonialism, globalization, and the reduction of all rational means and ends to production of wealth, which means the ultimate commodification of senses of existence and of intersubjectivity.3 In light of this hegemonic project over humanity and all senses of being, one must ask: Is it possible to think from beyond fitting rage and out of what seems most fragile and exposed, if not meaningless, to such Westernizing projects and colonized minds? My answer is yes. This is the case in spite of the power Western modernity has had over the development of the Americas and in spite of the political, military, economic, and cultural dependency of Latin America on Europe and North America. Given the density and richness of the thought this book presents, I must point out from the outset that this is an introductory work and a preparatory study. Once one begins to engage with Latin American philosophy, the very senses of philosophy and rationality need to be rethought. In taking up this task, one may also consider that in order to engage Latin American thought something else must happen: the invisible must become visible. The lives, histories, experiences, and articulate senses of being that have been dismissed by Western modern philosophy with its Eurocentric prejudice must become possible sites for the origination of thought. This book traces the Latin American philosophical dimension of this epistemic shift in world philosophies.

Liberation and Decolonial Philosophies in Latin America During the last century philosophy in Latin America has undergone a major sea change, from seeking an authentic Latin American philosophy (a task that replayed in different ways modern Western philosophical ideals and expectations about history and onto-theology) to recognizing Western domination and criticizing dependency on Western military, economic, and cultural hegemonic power, which limited and shaped the very question of a Latin American philosophy. The response to this self-awareness was a turn toward a Latin American philosophy of liberation and the development of decolonial philosophies. The present book traces this path from identity to liberatory and decolonial thinking and marks the limits of each attempt for liberation. At the same time, the analysis goes

4 | Latin American Philosophy from Identity to Radical Exteriority a step further to propose an aesthetics of liberation, a decolonial aesthetic turn. With the term “aesthetic” I mean to indicate the need for the undoing of coloniality and the affirmation of distinct Latin American experiences, dispositions, and senses of being in the affective and physically embodied dimensions, which set up and delimit the very projections and desires from which and in terms of which conceptual knowledge, ideas, and discourses of freedom take form. Liberatory and decolonial philosophies understand the task of thinking today in terms of a global pluri-versal (not uni-versal) world. Thus, thinking becomes a matter of world philosophies, of the appearing of ways of articulating humanity, the senses of things, intersubjective relations, and sensibilities previously obscured, ignored, and sequestered under the singular perspective of Western modern philosophy and its self-critical reformulations (such as, for example, critical theory, hermeneutics, and post-structuralism). To speak of world philosophies here is then to begin to recognize the need and possibility for the encounter between distinct ways of thinking in balanced and equal terms. I will introduce the book’s general path and project by mentioning the main figures discussed, who are in most cases little known in Western European and North American philosophy.4 Simón Bolívar (1783–1830) is perhaps the best-known Latin American thinker in North America, together with José Martí (1853–1895). Bolívar’s insistence in thinking out of Latin America’s own situation marks the opening moment for the unfolding of Latin American philosophy. This is a difficult and profound proposition, since in Bolívar’s thought one finds a distinct sense of ambiguity with respect to Latin American identities: the experience of being between the native and the European, never defined by either single origin, and always experiencing the tension between two (and in many cases more than two) senses of life.5 The next figure that appears in this work is Leopoldo Zea (1912–2004), whose thought constitutes the point of departure for contemporary Latin American philosophy. His call for a Latin American philosophy situated in its circumstance furthers Bolívar and Martí’s commitment to Latin American reality. Furthermore, in his work Zea recognizes that there is indeed an authentic Latin American philosophy. Thus, he sets up the formal path for raising the question of a Latin American philosophy that articulates universal human problems from a Latin American lived context and its cultural-historical reality. Zea’s limit is found in his attachment to Hegel’s sense of a great world philosophy, in the sense of the need to rise to the level and expectations of that single world philosophy and history, and in terms of the sense of cultural production that must be authentic. In his project then Zea follows the expectations of Western onto-theological reason and its exclusive, unilateral, and unidirectional teleology. A crucial moment in the development of Latin American philosophy is provided by the controversy between Leopoldo Zea and Peruvian philosopher Au-

Introduction | 5 gusto Salazar Bondy (1925–1974). Their disagreement concerned the very possibility of an authentic Latin American philosophy that could contribute to the history of philosophy in general. According to the Peruvian philosopher, given Latin America’s situation in the twentieth century, it is not possible to claim an authentic Latin American philosophy. As Salazar Bondy sees it, Latin American philosophy up to the late 1960s appears as a series of imitations, side commentaries, and repetitions of the ideas and movements most discussed in Europe. It is on the basis of this evidence that Salazar Bondy asserts the impossibility of an authentic Latin American philosophy. At the same time, Zea’s appeal to Latin American culture is precisely an appeal to the source of the problem Salazar Bondy sees with Latin American philosophy. Latin American, like all “third world” countries, is subject to a system of colonialist exploitation and domination and is ultimately dependent on Western European and North American culture. Seen from this perspective, Zea’s appeal to Latin America’s unique culture is only a call for a thinking grounded in a colonized culture. With this controversy Salazar Bondy exposes the colonialism that underlies Latin American culture and philosophy—or, in other words, the fact that Latin American thought is the result of colonized minds. But one may also mark Salazar Bondy’s own limits: he himself follows Western expectations that orient his discourse, in that he refutes the existence of Latin American philosophy in light of a lack of “authenticity,” thus returning to Western essentialism. Moreover, this authenticity is engaged through the idea of a single world history of thought and the hope to become part of it, thus repeating Zea’s idea of a universal contribution to world history. Finally, the Peruvian philosopher insists that Western analytical and pragmatist approaches should determine how one understands and critically engages Latin American philosophy and existence. The issue here is not that European and North American sources are used but that the way of thinking of the Latin American philosophy he envisions should be directed and oriented solely by Western ideas, concerns, and expectations. Another thinker who engages in the articulation of Latin American identity and its authenticity is Ernesto Mayz Vallenilla (1925). The Venezuelan philosopher was a student of Heidegger, and his thought is very much influenced by the German philosopher. In his work, Mayz Vallenilla responds to the question of identity by analyzing the everyday being-in-the-world of Latin American man. In his analysis the Venezuelan philosopher exposes the dramatic temporal sense of an originary rift or split in being between European and indigenous (as Simón Bolívar points out). This existential characteristic becomes the source of an existential incapacity in the way Latin Americans experience Being. The analysis concludes that the Americans are a people with a split sense of the past, and as a result they cannot have a sense of a single finality or accomplishment in the present. Unlike the European, who knows her or his original place, the Latin Ameri-

6 | Latin American Philosophy from Identity to Radical Exteriority can is incapable of making decisions or having a complete sense of identity. What distinguishes Mayz Vallenilla’s contribution is his approach to Latin American existence through Latin American man’s concrete temporality. This opens the question of temporality that in a different way later in the book will become central to understanding radical exteriority in Latin American philosophical thought. However, in his analysis Mayz Vallenilla projects a Western expectation of a totality composed of a single experience of identity and belonging to a single totality or “Being.” As a result, he is unable to offer an articulation of the phenomena of being Latin American in their distinct plural character and beyond a negative conclusion (the latter resulting from repeating the Western tradition’s aim to situate existence in terms of a single original totality). The figures mentioned thus far open a path for liberation philosophies. Salazar Bondy’s exposure of colonialism and dependency and Mayz Vallenilla’s phenomenological engagement of the temporalizing experience of being Latin American are taken up by the Mexican-Argentine philosopher Enrique Dussel (1934) in his philosophy of liberation. Dussel is the most noted of the founders of the philosophical movement known as Latin American Philosophy of Liberation, a movement also grounded on Salazar Bondy’s thought (he was another one of its founders). One of Dussel’s points of departure is the World-System Theory and theory of dependency developed by Raúl Prebisch in the 1950s and later by Immanuel Wallerstein. Dussel sets out from a distinction between a center composed of nations that control and exercise military, economic, and cultural power over the rest of the world and a periphery composed of the rest of nations and peoples. With this clear geopolitical distinction and by situating philosophy in its geopolitical context, Dussel exposes the source for a new philosophy liberated from the modern Western hegemonic system: Philosophy arises in distinct ways from the lives of those excluded, exploited, and peripheral to the Western centers of power. This means thinking in radical exteriority, that is, thinking from and with the living configurations and excluded lineages and histories of those considered peripheral and ultimately meaningless by Western calculative and instrumental rationalism and its production of knowledge and power under the ideals of capitalism, colonialism, neoliberalism, and globalism. This exposure of thought to alterity, the other, results from Dussel’s close reading of Levinas’s Totality and Infinity, with its critique of thinking in terms of a single totality and its recognition of alterity as the beginning of the question of being human as an ethical question. For Dussel, to be human is to have a distinct ethical call that results from finding one’s subjectivity by being in proximity to others who remain always beyond our decisions, control, and total comprehension (beyond totalizing hegemonies). Thus philosophical thought arises in alterity and toward the engagement with alterity—or, as I argue in the present work, as a thinking in radical exteriority. In short, Dussel opens a new space for philosophy by making

Introduction | 7 visible the lives and thought that underlie Western modernity and that are sequestered and obscured by the latter’s hegemonic power. Dussel’s sense of radical exteriority refers not only to geopolitical, ideological, rational, and normative configurations of existence but also and fundamentally to a pre-rational lived experience or sensibility, to the level of affective, embodied knowledge and experience. This insight points to the aesthetic dimension of liberation. This is a fundamental dimension that remains unexplored by Dussel’s thought. Although throughout his career Dussel develops ethical and political systems grounded on this sensibility, he does not develop an “aesthetics” of liberation.6 This exposure of aesthetic sensibility is fundamental to the basic premise and contribution of the present book concerning the further development of philosophy of liberation and decolonial thought: Once one sees the fundamental place of lived, embodied experiences, affective registers, and pre-conceptual and pre-linguistic sensibilities in the call for liberation as well as in the very perpetuation of the structures of power that sustain the colonized existence of Latin American culture and thought, the need for an aesthetics of liberation becomes clear. This is because it is at the embodied, epistemic level that colonialism works and limits the ways in which the colonized encounter and project their existence and all possibilities of conceptual philosophical knowledge. Without an aesthetics of liberation, conceptual and normative transformations remain still attached to colonizing dispositions operative at the level of embodiment and sensibility. Dussel’s thought comes under close critique by another Argentine philosopher and founder of the philosophy of liberation, Horacio Cerutti Guldberg (1950), as well as by Cuban-born feminist philosopher Ofelia Schutte (1945). Cerutti Guldberg questions Dussel’s qualifications to speak for the oppressed and his construction of a general category of a “people” of the periphery. Schutte also critiques Dussel’s placing himself at a point above the people while using general categories to refer to the excluded, rather than engaging their singularities and dense distinctness. These philosophers’ critiques make evident a basic ambiguity in Dussel’s thought: On the one hand, Dussel begins from the phenomenological experience of “radical exteriority” before rational discourse.7 He thus exposes concrete, distinct lives and excluded histories, lineages, and experiences as the possible beginning for new philosophies. On the other hand, however, Dussel’s thought ultimately takes the form of traditional rational arguments, seeking to speak theoretically and in the language of the center for the sake of gaining recognition for the excluded and the oppressed. The question is that of the extent to which Dussel is able to engage the fecund time-space of radical exteriority he has disclosed, given the position he takes and his way of thinking. Here one questions the limits of an approach that engages radical exteriority through conceptual rationalism and through historical/ana-dialectic critique and the development of a people’s ideology (in the Gramscian sense).

8 | Latin American Philosophy from Identity to Radical Exteriority Aníbal Quijano (1928) is a Peruvian sociologist and philosopher whose work explains the development of the center periphery system of power and the colonialism exposed by Salazar Bondy and Dussel, while also beginning to engage the concrete and distinct character of Latin American reality beyond general categories. Quijano’s work (like Dussel’s) shows that modernity is a much larger event than the one portrayed by the Western philosophical tradition. Quijano offers a genealogy of modernity and the ego cogito that allows one to understand how these developments in philosophy are inseparable from the colonization of the Americas in the sixteenth century and the development of a racial and economic world project. Briefly, with the colonization of the Americas a system of “coloniality of power and knowledge” is developed.8 With a new allocation of peoples identities, two kinds of being or “natural” races appear: those who are white, Western, and rational and “the others,” the irrational, savage, uncivilized, mythical peoples of the darker or less developed races. The difference allows for the Western ego cogito to see itself as the apogee of humanity. As a result of this egocentric view of humanity and knowledge, a specific sense of temporality develops. The present belongs to Western instrumental rationalism. All other ways of knowing are left in the past in terms of a binary system of epistemic prejudices: “Eastern-Western; primitive-civilized, magic–mythic-scientific, irrational-rational, traditional-modern.”9 The future is the burden of and its unfolding in what is to come only the task of Western thought in its historical rational development and production of new knowledge. This single historical timeline I call “the coloniality of time.” Quijano exposes the unfolding of Western egocentrism, but at the same time, by showing the development of the colonial side of it, he also shows that modernity goes well beyond the limits of the Western determination of knowledge. This unbounded sense of modernity becomes explicit when one focuses further on his analysis of temporality. Quijano’s uncovering of the coloniality of time is pivotal to the unfolding of decolonial thought. On the one hand, by following Quijano’s analysis one may show that the Western single sense of time and history functions as an aesthetic disposition that limits and determines the possibilities of philosophical knowledge at a pre-conceptual, embodied level. This makes this sense of temporality the underlying disposition that sustains the coloniality of power and knowledge. On the other hand, in his work Quijano also introduces the radically distinct experience of temporalities he finds in Latin American lived experience. This temporalizing movement gives rise to identities, to social, political, and cultural forms of lives, through the overlapping or pyramidal asymmetric simultaneity of various temporalities thought to be backward or to have been left behind by Western, modern, instrumental, rationalist progress and its single historical timeline.10 This sense of overlapping temporalities introduces an ana-chronic sense of time and history in that the simultaneous asymmetry of temporalities

Introduction | 9 situates them (temporality and history) beyond a single line of development or ordering of lives and sense of existence. (Quijano offers the example of economic structures in Latin America in which bartering, feudal systems, agricultural cultures, industrialist developments, and speculative capitalism overlap to create economic, social, and intellectual systems of knowledge.) This radical sense of temporality goes well beyond Western linear history, which offers the project of the ego cogito and its instrumental rationalism as the single path to human freedom and as the limit of all human knowledge. In light of Quijano’s work one finds a path for an unbounded opening toward thinking in radical exteriority through the aesthetic dimension of being in radical exteriority.11 As I point out in my discussion of the radical temporality found in Latin American experience, in light of the asymmetric simultaneity of time, Latin America figures existential and intersubjective dynamics neither outside nor inside modern Western rationalism. This experience of radical temporality cannot be understood as the negativity that calls for a new rationalist theory of dialectical or historical materialist critique. This is because Latin America, in its ana-chronic reality, plays out the slipping, the undoing of Western modern thought. But this critical exposure only emphasizes a crucial moment in Latin American thought and its decolonial turn toward world philosophies: In the final analysis Quijano exposes us to a larger sense of modernity. Western rational modernity becomes but one part of a fecund and heterogeneous time-space that remains to be thought in distinct encounters, and in and from radical exteriority. One finds in contemporary Latin American philosophy various powerful engagements with the transformative and diversifying re-articulation of rational thought in light of the concrete and distinct experiences from Latin America’s radical exteriority. One major figure is the Colombian philosopher Santiago Castro-Gómez (1958). In his major work, Crítica de la razón latinoamericana (The Critique of Latin American Reason) from 1996, Castro-Gómez develops a critique of Latin American thought and philosophy of liberation, and he calls for a critical, hybrid, fluid thinking that engages contemporary realities.12 Castro-Gómez follows a double strategy concerning deconstructive thought: On the one hand, he clarifies some of the principal misconceptions that lead to its present dismissal among many Western as well as Latin American philosophers. In doing so he applies deconstruction’s insights to his critique of Latin American thought from a Latin American distinct situation. On the other hand, Castro-Gómez sees that declaring a postmodern era from a Eurocentric perspective only obscures the new ways in which the coloniality of power and knowledge and its epistemic prejudices continue to operate at a world and local level. He shows how the unfolding of being as hybridity, the celebration of difference, the undoing of master narratives, and the decentering of capitalism’s traditional forms through the development of technologies, media, and the markets’ new dynamics are all changes

10 | Latin American Philosophy from Identity to Radical Exteriority that do not interrupt the perpetuation of the coloniality of power and knowledge in its epistemic, exploitative, and dismissive progress. In short, Castro-Gómez offers a radical engagement with contemporary Latin American reality by taking recourse to deconstruction precisely for the sake of demonstrating the limits of prior liberation philosophers, while at the same time showing that in the global undoing of sovereign nationalisms and master narratives the dissemination of meanings only reveals a new form of capitalism and of the coloniality of power and knowledge. Three other Latin American philosophers are among the many who have made crucial contributions to thinking in radical exteriority. The Argentine cultural theorist Walter Mignolo (1941) develops a sense of contemporary culture as a time-space of “colonial difference.” With this term Mignolo seeks direct engagements with the simultaneous asymmetrical temporality, distinct experiences, and senses of being that configure Latin American experiences as well as the experiences of many other subaltern peoples throughout the world. The issue is to remain with the tension given by the difference, both by undoing the coloniality of power and by affirming the distinctness covered over by the Western modern epistemic hegemony. In engaging such dense time-spaces of hybridity, Mignolo takes a major step toward the development of decolonial philosophy. One of the Latin American thinkers who articulate this insight directly in terms of philosophy is the Caribbean–Puerto Rican thinker Nelson Maldonado-Torres (1971), who in his writing on “the coloniality of being” has exposed a new ontological category that arises from the epistemic view and experience of the wretched of the earth, those who have been excluded, exploited, and made available for unthinkable lives of suffering. In his Fanonian meditations, MaldonadoTorres gives philosophical articulation to the dark side of modernity by beginning to develop categories and concepts that make evident the invisible experience of modernity at large. The third contemporary figure that I must highlight is the Argentine philosopher and feminist María Lugones (1948). In her work she recognizes the gendered dimension of the coloniality of power and knowledge and its epistemic violence. Lugones’s work remains with the tension found in concrete lives between oppression and resistance that is internal to the singular experiences of those living the coloniality of being. In recognizing such internal tension Lugones makes possible the engagement of the distinct experiences of coloniality and the opening of spaces for a decolonial resistance that frees and positively articulates concrete, hybrid lives. In short, these thinkers capture some of the crucial elements of the fluid and disseminating movement from which and toward which moves the thought of Dussel, Quijano, and many other Latin American philosophers past and present. The book closes by returning to a seminal figure for Latin American philosophy of liberation, decolonial thought, as well as many other liberation philoso-

Introduction | 11 phies throughout the world, the Martinique-born French-Algerian thinker Frantz Fanon (1925–1961). His writings out of the experience of the colonized inform the work of Dussel as well as that of most of the other figures discussed in this volume, including my own work. Fanon’s analysis exposes the trauma of colonization at a psychological and epidermic level (to use Fanon’s own expression). Thus—along with the geopolitical, cultural, and conceptual experience of the coloniality of power and knowledge—appears the aesthetic dimension of coloniality. This is already introduced by Dussel’s insight concerning the pre-linguistic experience of proximity in radical exteriority that prefigures language and dialogue in the face-to-face encounter with the other. This dimension is also present in the temporality that, as reading Quijano suggests, tacitly orients the life, horizon for meaning, and knowledge of the colonized as well as in the radical asymmetric temporality in Latin American experience. Indeed, as becomes apparent in Fanon’s Black Skin White Masks, for the colonized every attempt at creating a decolonizing self-image results in being resituated within the time line of the coloniality of time.13 In light of the primacy of life, and the way life is colonized in its very embodied forms (which is shown also by Mignolo, Maldonado-Torres, and Lugones), it becomes clear that along with and fundamental to any liberation philosophy or decolonial project, what is needed is a decolonial aesthetics. This task involves thinking from and with experiences of coloniality at the level of embodiment, temporality, and the imaginary that sustains the epistemic prejudice of the systems of coloniality. At this point two other important figures appear, whose work gives indications of paths toward a decolonial aesthetics: the French-Chilean philosopher and cultural critic Nelly Richard (1948) and the Chilean installation artist Alfredo Jaar (1959). Their work shows that a decolonial aesthetics may occur through the displacement of the systems of coloniality that situate the horizon of knowledge. This happens both temporally and spatially. In her work on theater, Richard uncovers the undercurrent of a society that denies its memory; she exposes the operation and unleashes the embodied memory of the violence suffered by Chilean society under the military regime of Pinochet’s junta, which enacts in a most explicit way the project sustained by the coloniality of power and knowledge. Thus, Richard interrupts the single linearity of the coloniality of time, and she does so by opening a critical space that begins not from already operative conceptual knowledge and language and their single temporal orientation but from what has been forcefully excluded. Alfredo Jaar’s works also engage coloniality at an aesthetic level, both in terms of time and space. His installations and images displace the seemingly natural and necessary correlation between images and the colonial epistemic prejudices that traditionally frame them. As a result, each member of the public must reconstitute the context and time-space that situates the sense of experience and representation. This means that one’s participation in

12 | Latin American Philosophy from Identity to Radical Exteriority the system of power and knowledge becomes explicit. Such exposure is a release that allows for other aesthetic experiences and thereby for thinking in ways that articulate lives without the violent and tacit force of the coloniality of knowledge and its epistemic colonizing delimitations of all forms, projections, and possibilities for life. Before moving on I should add that in writing this book I have not presupposed much knowledge on the part of the reader concerning Latin American philosophy and its terminology. Moreover, the book makes an argument that requires the particular usage of certain terms as well as the retranslation of terms that are commonly used in Western philosophy. Therefore, as I have already indicated above, in this introduction I have thought it useful to highlight key terms by placing them in quotation marks and then explain them by using a footnote at the end of the sentence in which they are first introduced.

Delimitations of the Project In the present work I speak from the perspective of a Latin American philosopher living in the West, and I focus on the philosophy of Latin America while keeping in mind the implications its development has for ways of understanding not only philosophy in the North American and European Continental tradition but also world philosophies. This means that this work aims to open new venues for Latin American philosophy in a global context. It has, however, a series of limitations, which are best introduced by pointing to others who have done work on issues related to this project. The question of Latin American indigenous thought leads to the periods before the arrival of the conquistadors, to a long history of transformations, and then to today’s emergence of Latin American indigenous thinking as a horizon for new ways of understanding intersubjectivity in Latin America. One sees this from the work of Miguel León-Portilla,14 from the Zapatista movement, and from the contemporary socialist Bolivarian revolution in Latin America. Given their scope, these issues remain to be engaged in a future project. This observation and themes lead me to another missing figure of major importance, Günther Rodolfo Kusch (1922–1979).15 Kusch is an Argentine philosopher, another co-founder of the philosophy of liberation, whose work develops through a profound engagement with Latin American indigenous and popular thought. Kusch’s thought does not only put into question the very categorial and relational modalities of thinking and the disposition that orient Western and Westernized Latin American philosophy; in his work, he also is able to articulate the aesthetic experience of the being (estar) of indigenous peoples and, in light of this insight, of the peoples of the Americas in their distinct experiences. Given the force and significance of his work, this will be the subject of a separate writing project that will develop further what the present book opens up. I should also add that indige-

Introduction | 13 nous thought and Kusch’s work with it point to another major field of studies that remains beyond the present work, namely the development of environmental ethics in Latin America. Particularly with respect to the question of liberation and decolonial thought, the affirmation of life includes non-human life. As Enrique Leff has shown since the 1980s, the approach of Quijano and the decolonial turn are inseparable from environmental ethics.16 The connection is only the stronger when one considers indigenous thought with respect to Earth and life, as is clear from such concepts as pachamama. Another major issue is the development of Latino/a philosophy and its relationship to Latin American philosophy. However closely they may be related, the two philosophical fields should not be conflated (to do so is to ignore and abandon thinking with a sense of distinctness and singularity). First of all, Latino/Latina philosophy concerns Latin American, Central American, and Caribbean peoples who have come to live in North America, or those who are of such origins and born in the United States. The lives and situations of those peoples give rise to philosophies that have different orientations and concerns than those held by philosophers who live in Latin America and not in the United States. But this simple identification introduces the immense complexity of Latino/Latina thought, because with it arises the question of Latino/Latina identity in North America. This is a field of contestation densely constituted by issues of power, race, and gender. Jorge J. E. Gracia, Eduardo Mendieta, and Linda Alcoff, just to name three main figures, have been doing very interesting and important work on Latino/Latina philosophies and on identity.17 The most obvious convergence between Latino/ Latina philosophies and Latin American thought is the history of colonialism, violence, exploitation, and exclusion that distinguishes the hegemonic, capitalist and later neoliberal and globalizing power of the United States over the rest of the Americas as well as over its non-white citizens and histories. This I take to be a point of convergence for the unfolding of a future trans-American philosophy based on the common experiences of coloniality. Along with this fundamental relationship there is a direct cultural, historical, and existential continuity between Latino/Latina philosophies and Latin American philosophies: shared memories, histories, and senses of lives that remain beyond Western hegemonic reasoning and violence. The points of convergence and overlapping begin to become apparent by the end of the book, when I discuss the work of Walter Mignolo, María Lugones, and Nelson Maldonado-Torres. The first two are from the Southern Cone; the latter is a Puerto Rican–Caribbean philosopher. All of them reside in the United States and are deeply aware and engaged with Latino/Latina issues, sustaining a continuous exchange between Latino/Latina philosophies and Latin American philosophies without neglecting their distinct characters. Having noted this important difference, there are a number of other crucial issues that relate to thinking in radical exteriority and that remain beyond the

14 | Latin American Philosophy from Identity to Radical Exteriority scope of the present work. The proximity of thinkers like Enrique Dussel to American pragmatism (a point he himself has emphasized to me) as well as the question of the relationship between North American “American philosophy” and Latin American philosophy is also of principal importance, as made apparent by the work of Eduardo Mendieta and Gregory Fernando Pappas.18 Mendieta’s work has also contributed to the issue of the relationship between philosophy of liberation and theology of liberation (a differentiation Dussel retains as fundamental to his thought).19 Linda Martín Alcoff, Ofelia Schutte, Chela Sandoval, and Maria Lugones focus their work on questions concerning the epistemic reconfigurations of philosophy and our expectations of what counts for rationality and knowledge in general, in light of race and gender issues and Latino/Latina thought and experiences.20 Ofelia Schutte’s work on feminist philosophy and Latin America has inspired new generations of philosophers who are presently contributing to such studies.21 In the case of this book, feminist thought plays a crucial role in Schutte’s exposure of the limits of the philosophy of liberation as well as in the turn to a decolonial feminism in Lugones’s work. I find Lugones to be closest to my own sense of direction and aesthetic sensibilities concerning decolonial thought. The dimensions and depth of issues of race and exclusion in the Americas in the Latin American, Caribbean, and Latino/Latina experiences have been made powerfully clear by the work of the Caribbean Philosophical Association, Nelson Maldonado-Torres, Ramón Grosfoguel, and Lewis Gordon, among others.22 Dina V. Picotti from Argentina has also made clear the history of racism concerning Afro cultures and their destruction in South America, an issue often overlooked in the Southern Cone in contrast to its treatment in AfroCaribbean and North American philosophies.23 Each of the Latin American philosophy readers, which include the legendary work of Jorge J. E. Gracia (1986), its extended edition with Elizabeth Millán, Eduardo Mendieta’s compilations of Latin American philosophy, and Susana Nucettelli’s companion, marks a path with respect to how Latin American philosophy is being defined in the United States.24 Elizabeth Millán’s work on the history of Latin American philosophy, particularly on the nineteenth century, has given depth and breadth to the study of Latin American philosophy in the United States as well.25 Furthermore, one should be aware of the decolonial movements that appear within Europe and that have begun to undo the myth of an original, homogeneous Europe, such as the political movement “les indigènes de la république” in France and “il pensiero meridiano” in Italy.26 Finally, another fundamental aspect of decolonial thought is that of the relationship between decolonial African and Islamic philosophies and Latin American thought. Again, these are questions that can remain only in the open horizon of the present introductory work. In naming all of those working on Latin American thought and beyond I am filled with gratitude; it is their work that has kept the thin opening for Latin

Introduction | 15 American philosophy in North America a reality and the possibility of liberation and decolonial philosophies alive. In terms of the present book I am delighted to have the opportunity to introduce so many thinkers and works little known and more often than not untranslated in the English-speaking world. I can only hope that the following pages will lead readers into and beyond that fecund, living thought that is Latin American philosophy.

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PA RT 1 Identity, Dependency, and the Project of Liberation

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1

The Question of a Latin American Philosophy and Its Identity Simón Bolívar and Leopoldo Zea

Philosophy and Western culture have been synonymous at least since Hegel’s philosophy of history. Even when philosophy has been ignored, degraded, reappropriated, or put into question and even when philosophers have sought to “destroy” it, philosophy has been taken as a given inseparable from Western culture and born of it. Practically speaking, no one from the West or educated under the Western tradition, no matter how critical of it, would put into question the existence of European, French, German, or Italian philosophy. In Latin America the situation is different: The question that animates the very arising into existence and the path of Latin American thought is if there is Latin American philosophy, or if it is at all possible to speak of such a phenomenon. This is not due to a lack of culture or thought but rather to the distinct situation of the Latin American mind. Since Latin America’s inceptive insertion into European history (1492), given its inseparability from the development of European modernity (as the very name “Latin America” itself indicates), to be an American, in its broad sense, has meant to be part of many histories, lineages, memories, and various forms of knowledge. Indigenous, Andalusian, Islamic, African, Jewish, criolla, ladina, mestiza, Guarani, Inca, Maya, Araucana: Latin America has as its origins a diversifying difference that calls not for a question of Being and for a single philosophy but for the articulation of that distinct play of concrete realities that are clumsily misrepresented under one name. Latin American philosophy, then, may be said to be philosophy by virtue of remaining philosophical, that is, by virtue of remaining with the very question of the possibility and existence of a thought that may articulate the density, distinctness, and fecundity of human experiences. In this chapter, I introduce Latin American philosophy through three figures, each of whom in a critical way calls for a Latin American thought born from its distinctive and diversifying realities. Each of them recognizes the radical difference that situates Latin American thought and deepens

19

20 | Identity, Dependency, and the Project of Liberation the question of the possibility of philosophical thought that may arise from the Latin American situation and at the same time speak to others in an articulate hermeneutical dialogue. Together these thinkers introduce the call for a Latin American situated thought that must give articulation to the distinct realities of the Americas.

Abyssal America: Simón Bolívar In his famous “Letter from Jamaica,” written in Kingston in 1815, Simón Bolívar offers a frank and direct account of the past and future of the Americas in light of the revolutionary movements already on their way. As Bolívar points out, to speak of Latin America is to speak of a land “so vast, so varied, and so little known,” that he himself may only offer some approximate conjectures concerning its situation and future.1 In his introductory words, Bolívar emphasizes that it is impossible to give a clear and complete account of the American situation. To illustrate his predicament he speaks of the failed attempts by von Humboldt to give an account of the Americas in his encyclopedia of theoretical and practical knowledge. His limitation and failure are due to the fact that “although some of the facts and its [America’s] development are known . . . the better parts are shrouded in mystery.”2 Bolívar goes on to candidly express his view concerning the break in the relationship between Spain and the Americans. He reminds his reader of the sanguinary frenzy unleashed upon the Americas by the colonizers and concludes that the ties that once held Spain and the Americas in kinship have been severed.3 He then goes on to identify an abyssal truth at the heart of the seeming mystery that enshrouds the very existence of the Americans: We are . . . neither Indian nor European, but a species midway between the legitimate proprietors of this country and the Spanish usurpers. In short, being Americans by birth and deriving our rights from Europe, we have to assert these rights against the rights of the natives of the country, and at the same time we must remain in the country against the invaders’ invasion. This places us in a most extraordinary and difficult situation.4

Bolívar’s words provide a view of the American situation yesterday and today. The crucial point for us is to recognize the extraordinary and difficult character of being American that he manages to put forth in this brief passage. As Bolívar points out, being American or Latin American means asserting European rights over those of the natives of the country, while at the same time resisting the invader in the country, that is, the European. This statement has often been interpreted as the recognition that Latin Americans are both European and indigenous in origin. Or it has been read as what it is at face value, the declaration of European ideals over indigenous senses of life, which ultimately continues a his-

Question of a Latin American Philosophy | 21 tory of exclusion of indigenous thought. However, in my reading, underneath this basic recognition lies a deeper reality: to be an American means to inhabit a place of fundamental uprootedness. As I just mentioned, immediately before the above quotation, Bolívar explains that the bloody conquest and destruction of indigenous cultures has made it impossible to find a place of return to what was there before the arrival of the Spaniards. But then, in the quotation at hand, we find a deeper existential difficulty with the place of the American, an irresolvable double displacement. On the one hand, the revolutions and the foundation of the American nations are grounded on European ideals. As Bolívar’s sharp analysis points out, this means asserting the European founded rights—the ideals of freedom, liberty, and equality that distinguish the Enlightenment with respect to the development of rationalism in the name of human freedom—over those of the natives. On the other hand, the Americans wage a war against the European invaders. In short, the place of the American is a place of double violence and destruction, a place granted by a twofold war against one’s very identities. To be an American in such situation means to be in a constant state of uprootedness and self-negation. This internal displacement and violence is evident when one considers that it does not take long for the newfound national governments to begin the extermination of the indigenous people in the name of progress and national identities. To cite a classic example, one can see a distinct case of this perpetual internal violence in the history of Argentina in the nineteenth century, where we find from the period almost immediately following the declaration of independence a continuous process of self-destruction. This occurs with the rise to power of the gauchos and the indigenous genocide under Juan Manuel de Rosas in his desert campaigns.5 This period is followed by Sarmiento’s call for the destruction of Rosas’s gaucho culture in the name of Western industrialized society and the building of the cities in his Civilizacion y Barbarie (Civilization and Barbarism: The Life of Juan Facundo Qiroga [1845]). Moreover, one of the main reasons for the disappearance of the Negro population of Argentina, which constituted 30 percent of the population of Buenos Aires in the 1830s, was the systematic drafting of males into the army, particularly during the war between Paraguay and Argentina under Sarmiento’s government between 1864 and 1870.6 Thereafter comes the rise of Rocca, under whose presidency takes place the final war against the indigenous peoples, endorsed by Sarmiento. During these bloody campaigns the Negro armies are used to decimate the indigenous population, and the colored male population of Buenos Aires vanishes thanks to the casualties of the war. In short, through this period from the early century to the beginning of the twentieth century we find the continuous self-destruction of Americans, be they criollos, indigenous, of African origin, or immigrated Europeans, all of them

22 | Identity, Dependency, and the Project of Liberation peoples always caught in the irresolvable violence of that dense and ambiguous space Simón Bolívar had so well delimited in his letter. At the same time, it is well known that the “Letter from Jamaica” already contains the main thrust of Bolívar’s thought—namely, his conscious struggle to end the American dependency on Spain and his call for Americans to rule themselves by finally overcoming their passive role in politics. Only if it is active, argues Bolívar, does America have a future. This call for an active American self-determination is a call based on unity, on the need for the diverse lands and peoples to come together under a shared freedom, as he makes famously clear in his second address to the National Congress in Angostura, Venezuela: The diversity of racial origin will require an infinitely firm hand and great tactfulness in order to manage this heterogeneous society, whose complicated mechanism is easily damaged, separated, and disintegrated by the slightest controversy. . . . Our hands are now free, but our hearts still suffer the ills of slavery. . . . All of our moral power will not suffice to save our infant republic from this chaos unless we fuse the mass of the people . . . unity, unity, unity must be the motto of all things. The blood of our citizens is varied: let it be mixed for the sake of unity.7

Here is not the place to engage in a discussion of the other great thinker of freedom José Martí, but one must at least keep in mind the resonance of Bolívar’s words with those of Martí, their common vision of liberation across and without the exclusion of difference.8 Bolívar’s call for an active America, however, is founded on the realization of a space of uprootedness, and what ensues from this ambiguous space is even more tragic than what went before: genocide and nationalistic wars between the new American nations. The vision of a diversity shared in unity and freedom, which Bolívar would call for throughout his life, is marked by an internal, abyssal difference. As the example above shows, and as the history of Latin America with respect to difference and violence illustrates, the solution to this difference cannot be found in appealing to a single origin, national identity, tradition, or history in the name of progress. Rather, the difficulty Bolívar puts forth so clearly requires that one remain with the Latin American situation as such: that is, understanding by undergoing and going under that uprootedness, by thinking through a being in between and in alterity that cannot be framed or resolved by national, ethnic, or any other essentialist vision of Latin America and its peoples. I will now move to a second moment in the history of Latin American thought, in which the Mexican philosopher Leopoldo Zea calls for a thought situated in and arising from Latin America’s concrete reality. I will consider Zea’s profound contribution to Latin American thought as well as the limitations of his project with respect to his engagement with the radical difference we found in Bolívar.

Question of a Latin American Philosophy | 23

Deepening and Exposing the Ambiguity of Latin American Philosophy: Between a Situated Thought and Universal History in the Thought of Leopoldo Zea The abyss marked by Simón Bolívar’s statement concerning the sense of being Latin American leaves an opening that will echo throughout the unfolding of Latin American thought in the twentieth century. The difficulty takes the form of the question of identity, that is, the question of the possibility or impossibility of a Latin American philosophy. We are speaking of a philosophy that engages Latin America’s own reality and that may develop a conceptual sense of that distinct existence, ultimately giving articulation to the senses of being Latin American. We turn now to the Mexican philosopher Leopoldo Zea, one of the founders of Latin American philosophy, whose work is distinguished by his insistence on the existence of a distinct Latin American philosophy that may be traced from the famous debates of Valladolid in the sixteenth century about the humanity of the indigenous peoples of the Americas and through the positivism and romanticism that underlie the revolutionary movements of the nineteenth century in the Americas to the new developments of a Latin American philosophy situated on its own historical and cultural grounds with its own characteristics.9

“Our Own”: Recognizing America’s Philosophical History and its Relationship with European Thought In Concerning an American Philosophy (En torno a una filosofía americana), published in 1942, Leopoldo Zea writes, To be a Latin American was until very recently a great misfortune, because this did not allow us to be European. Today it is just the opposite: the inability to become European, in spite of our great efforts, allows us to have a personality; it allows us to learn, in this moment of crisis in European culture, that there is something of our own [algo que nos es propio] that can give us support. What this something is should be one of the issues that a Latin American philosophy must investigate.10

Zea’s most evident contribution to Latin American thought is his call for and recognition of the existence of a Latin American philosophy, and his doing so by calling for thought that arises in critical engagement with its historical and existential situation. Moreover, this turn toward the Americas anticipates in a way the philosophy of liberation by putting at its center the asymmetry in the concepts of identity between the conqueror and the conquered that results from the cultural and intellectual dependency of Latin Americans under European and American Western ideas of what counts as humanity and culture.11 In Zea’s account, the colonizer establishes the asymmetry by reducing the colonized to the subhuman, thus putting into question the humanity of the colonized.12 From this

24 | Identity, Dependency, and the Project of Liberation exclusion of the American as human arises for Latin American thought the question of the humanity of those peoples of the new continent. This question in turn is expressed over and over again in a distinct form as the question of Latin American identity: “What does it mean to be Latin American?” This question becomes the ontological question for the American, in contrast to the European questions of what existence is or why is there anything rather than nothing. What makes for a history of Latin American thought driven by the question of Latin American identity is, then, the European colonization and development of modern rationalism in its instrumental and calculative as well as humanistic paths, which were enforced over the Americas. In other words, what distinguishes Latin American philosophy from the sixteenth century on is the question of the humanity of Latin Americans and hence the issue of the possibility of a Latin American philosophy that may articulate the distinct senses of being human in Latin American experience. In 1942, in light of the loss of the central gravity of European ideals thanks to the two world wars, Zea sees the historical moment for Latin American philosophy to affirm its distinct sense of humanity and thought and in doing so to renovate creatively the project of humanity from a situation other than the European. Zea’s response to the question of whether there is a Latin American philosophy is affirmative from the very start. This is because, as I have just indicated, to be American is to struggle with the question of identity, although under the asymmetry of coloniality. In terms of Simón Bolívar’s statement about being Americans, one may say that Leopoldo Zea will articulate that very abyssal situation by recognizing how being in between and in constant struggle is already a philosophical way of being. For Zea, in light of this asymmetry, a dependency sets in: The subhuman continue to attempt to show that they are like the master conquerors. The nineteenth century unfolds in Latin American philosophy as a series of attempts to resolve the asymmetry by showing that the Americans are indeed like the European man and therefore are humans capable of the same accomplishments as the Europeans and later the North Americans. But this is a series of duplications and applications of forms of thought, projects, and definitions that are alien to the existence of the Americans. Latin American thought, from the quarrel between Bartolomé de las Casas and Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda in Valladolid about the humanity of the native Americans through most of the nineteenth century, appears as a desperate struggle to affirm the being of the Americans through a perpetuation of a dependency on the very model of the human as modern Western man. But for Zea this pernicious cycle, in spite of all its imitative character and the intellectual dependency it implies, still is a form of philosophical thought. However, given the pernicious character of this tradition in Latin American philosophy, the crucial moment for him is the turn to “our own” Latin American reality and thought. As we will see later on in this section,

Question of a Latin American Philosophy | 25 this turn must at the same time respond to its origins, that is, to Western philosophy. For Zea, exploring the question of Latin American philosophy means showing the place Latin American philosophy has had and may have in the context of Western philosophy.13 In his 1942 essay Zea goes on to explain what is “our own.” He writes, “What makes us lean toward Europe and at the same time resist being European is what is properly ours, what is American.”14 The being in between being Europeans and being Americans, this abyssal existential conflict, marks what is properly “ours.”15 Zea’s analysis deepens Bolívar’s observation: According to the Mexican philosopher, the Latin American conception of the world is European, and, through the application of these alien expectations, the Latin Americans’ own actions are alien (ajenas) to them. Thus, Latin American thought finds itself in limbo between ideas that do not find application to their situation and a seemingly unfitting reality, made to appear meaningless or limited by the application of foreign ideas over reality. The result is that “Americans feel European by origin but inferior to this origin in their circumstance. . . . [The American] feels disgust for what is American and resentment against what is European.”16 The internal relationship between the European and the American situation orients the American mind through disgust and resentment against its existence. This is the internal dynamic that causes the inferiority complex under the shadow of the European man. This critique is not only applicable to the Southern Cone or Central America. According to Zea, this very complex also occurs in North America.17 Thus the inferiority complex, not the project of progress and industrialization or the civilizing of the barbaric that Sarmiento imagines, becomes a possible meeting point for North America and South America. As the Mexican philosopher explains, North America becomes a great technological and economic power out of a drive to outdo the Europeans in their rationalist, instrumental project of progress through the infinite calculative manipulation of nature and production of wealth.18 In their race to be more rational and calculative than the Europeans, North Americans fall into a productive and calculative frenzy. Instead of making culture (though they do unfold an historical-existential consciousness that may inform people’s identities), they end up producing only technology and wealth and interpreting the sense of history in terms of the futural projection of progress through calculative production.19 The crucial point of Zea’s critique of North America and the Americas in general is not against technology but against a lack of cultural creativity. According to him, racing after European production and outdoing its progress amounts to not thinking from the concrete reality of the North American situation; furthermore, a society that is not capable of addressing and developing the problems and issues that situate it in its existence and claims to humanity cannot be considered a culture.20 One may think, for example, of the genocide of the indig-

26 | Identity, Dependency, and the Project of Liberation enous American peoples in North America and the expansion of the United States through the invasion of Cuba, Mexico, and Puerto Rico under the ideals of manifest destiny. Both historical periods are concrete parts of American existence and at the same time become buried under the claim of progress, power, and greatness over the world under the power of positivistic thought, production, all of which is seen as if under the grace of God. But this criticism only serves as a contrast to Latin America’s own squalid situation with respect to Europe and the United States. As Zea sees it, with its complex of inferiority and its desperation for survival and well-being, Latin America is a mute bureaucracy (be it civil or military), which wraps around exterior power like a desperate snake clinging to the ideals of North America and Europe. In short, to say it in contemporary terms, in all the excitement and luxury of New York or Miami Beach, or in the shanty towns (villamiserias) that surround each capital and constitute the “metropolitan areas” of such “European” cities in Latin America as Buenos Aires, what is hardly to be found, except for isolated islands and voices from exile, is an American culture grounded in its historical and existential reality. For Zea, again echoing the sense of internal violence we already found in Simón Bolívar, both “euromanía” and “nordomanía” amount to a history of selfobliteration carried out throughout the nineteenth century in Latin America.21 As he puts it in La filosofía americana como filosofía sin más (Latin American Philosophy as Philosophy and Nothing More), much of the history of Latin American thought in the nineteenth century amounts to a “fratricidal” (fraticidio) struggle to do away with what seems strange to the inherent and adopted European articulations of existence, or to avoid blemishing an inheritance that should be eternal and unchanging.22 But in what way may the American overcome this complex of inferiority, dependency, and violence?

The Creative Turn: An American Philosophy in Light of European Thinking For Zea passivity and passive learning result in the erasure of one’s own history and lead to a sense of inferiority and to obsessive reaction to and dependence on Europe and North America.23 In attempting to prove one’s humanity and the existence of one’s philosophy by producing the same systems the Europeans have produced, and by attempting to produce the same fruit their human struggles have produced, one forms a perpetual pattern of taking in and fetishizing foreign ideas and culture. In the repetitive struggle of such attempts, one ignores one’s own circumstance or historical ground, ultimately neglecting one’s concrete existence. As Zea explains, “We want to adapt the American circumstance to a conception of the world we inherited from Europe, and not adapt that conception of the world to the American circumstance.”24 Here we find the limit and turning point in Latin American thought: The Americans do not make the necessary

Question of a Latin American Philosophy | 27 transformative step in their relationship with their European cultural origins. The task of Latin American thought is not to copy or borrow and apply European ideals to the American situation. Rather, to think from Latin America means to take the European ideas that by force, habit, weakness, and necessity become inseparable from the American mind and adapt them to the American situation.25 In Latin American Philosophy as Philosophy and Nothing More, Zea is more specific about the incorporation of the European and North American conceptions of the world in Latin American thought: “select, adapt, the expression of Western philosophy that may best suit our needs, our reality.”26

k If for Zea Latin American philosophy occurs out of the asymmetry that puts into question the being human of the American, the root of the American inferiority complex goes deeper. It concerns the assimilation of Latin America experience and thought into a painful and all-powerful fiction at the very foundations of the history of Western thought. This is the separation between rationally understood ideas and life as lived experience. As Zea states in 1942, “Our epoch is characterized by the rupture between ideas and reality. European culture is in crisis because of such rupture.”27 It is precisely this separation that for the Americans sustains all senses of being inferior.28 The American lives in limbo by virtue of his displaced consciousness, which situates itself through ideas alien to her concrete existence. Simultaneously, this being in limbo is also caused by the perpetual repudiation of the American circumstance that is caused by the blind projection of European ideals over the American circumstance. We find examples of this, according to Zea, in both the Comptean drive that accompanied the birth of Latin American nations as well as in the romanticism that aims to create nations and a progress in the image of Western progress.29 But given this split between ideas and the concrete historical situation, one must wonder how a Latin American thought may take up its circumstance. Given Zea’s recognition of the violence and domination Latin American suffers under European colonialism, it may be surprising that according to him, because the philosophical ideas that configure the American world and expectations are European, it is only fitting that an American thought continue to develop Western philosophical themes. First of all, for Zea Western thought has inserted itself in such way in the Americas that there cannot be a Latin American thought that does not take its departure from European philosophy. But this historical fact bears a crucial insight for Latin American thought: The root of the force of Western thought and culture, the power that makes for its eventual worldwide expansion, is its “creativity” or originality (originalidad). In order to understand the possible development of Latin American thought with respect to the Western traditions, we must understand this idea of originalidad.

28 | Identity, Dependency, and the Project of Liberation According to Zea, Western creativity is founded in its reflexive thought; it is a creative process in the sense that it occurs from a people’s engagement with their own living historical situation. Europeans develop philosophy as a way to articulate the issues, questions, and responses they have for their living existence, and they do so out of their self-conscious awareness. As Zea understands it, this process involves not only looking at one’s immediate needs and situation but also taking the reflexive turn and putting one’s singular situation in its larger contexts. To use Zea’s own metaphor, Europeans see the tree within the forest and also recognize the tree in its singularity. This double recognition of the particular and its larger context makes the engagement with one’s situation a universal moment, as one’s reality becomes part of a larger and open dialogue with others. The accomplishment of Western philosophy and its value for Latin America is this reflexive universal turn in the engagement of one’s historical situation.30 The recognition of the inseparability of European philosophy and culture from Latin American thought and the creativity at the heart of Western development does not mean that Latin America should limit itself to a dependency from that tradition and to a repetition of the fruitful results and forms that result from the European articulations given to their particular experiences. Zea writes, “The themes we have called universal and the themes proper to the American circumstance are closely linked. In treating one we need to treat the other.”31 Human beings in their existence share the same concerns. They wonder about the same experiences, and even if degraded by such situations of power as the one that turns the non-Westerners into subhuman, those human beings will wonder and argue for their humanity and senses of being. Zea writes, “Philosophy tries to resolve the problems that face man in his existence.”32 This natural wonder that makes all of us human is only recognizable, though, if one turns to one’s concrete situation. Therefore, Zea continues: Abstract themes will have to be seen from the circumstance proper to Americans. . . . These themes will come into focus from the point of view given by his [the American’s] interest, and that interest will be determined by his manner of living, by his capacity or inadequacy, in a word, by his circumstance. In the case of America, her contribution to philosophy concerning such themes will be colored by the American circumstance.33

Zea aims for a thought situated in the American circumstance, which, in taking up the European conceptual tradition from its own Latin American circumstance, may give new impulse to our encounter with universal problems such as time, God, and ethical human existence. The key to this situated universality is that for Zea conceptual philosophical thought is not an abstract activity but what one would call an historical hermeneutic experience. In and from the encounter with our singular historical situation, thought begins to take form. What may give us a place next to Western thought is that form discovered in the encounter with historical, singular, and ephemeral situatedness. One might say that only

Question of a Latin American Philosophy | 29 with conscious acknowledgment of our concrete experiences can we become part of a universal community in an active way, that is, literally, as collaborators.

The Double Appropriation of Historical Memory in American Thought Philosophy and “Nothing More” In his book America in History, published in 1957, fifteen years after the essay I have been discussing, Leopoldo Zea returns to the question of creativity. He situates American thought in relation to its European origins through the recognition of a certain American obsession with “originality” (originalidad) in the face of European and Western culture.34 The philosopher understands this obsession as indicative of a distinct task: “The question [of originality] would rather concern the possibilities or incapacities of the American to actively participate in the creation or recreation of Western culture.”35 This is a crucial moment in the discussion because of Zea’s definition of the active participation of Americans as “creating” and “recreating” Western culture. As we saw above, America’s collaboration with the tradition will only happen if we can appropriate the ideas of the Western tradition that have ruled our understanding and expectations of existence and transform them, re-create them. However promising, here we come to a problematic aspect of Zea’s thought that has perhaps already been intimated throughout our analysis: Creativity is not a matter of autonomous configuration of universals but rather a participatory activity in a process already configured by Western thought. Zea is clear on this already in 1942: “Whether we want it or not, we are the children of European culture. From Europe we have received our cultural framework, what could be called our structure: language, religion, customs; in a word our conception of life and world is European.”36 Indeed, the very word “humanity” that Zea uses to identify the sub-human as human without more (sin más), as human in the full sense of the word, is founded on the Western definition of humanity. In Latin American Philosophy as Philosophy and Nothing More, Zea situates the project of Latin American philosophy in the following terms: This is, no more and no less, what is required of Latin American philosophy, of its philosophers. First, that they be conscious of being part of a great cultural unity that Western expansion has made evident, part of what we call humanity. Second, that being conscious of being part of such great unity, nothing that has been accomplished, nothing of what has been done, no experience, may be foreign to them, and this being the case, they may appropriate them, not as curiosity or memory but as instrument for confronting the problems of their own reality. The original, if it must have any importance, will come by itself, independently from the instrument and moreover, as a result of how this instrument has been and may be used.37

In order to have a sense of Latin American philosophy as a creative thought and nothing more, we will have to break down this passage and discuss some of its implications.

30 | Identity, Dependency, and the Project of Liberation The creativity Zea seeks happens by virtue of the transformative appropriation of Western philosophy. This is possible as a result of a double imposition over Latin American thought by Western philosophy. On the one hand, Western thought opens the question of reflexive thought, of reason, and with it begins the reinterpretation of human being in terms of a universal sense of humanity as the question of human freedom. But this turn reduces humanity to its Western progress and expectations, thus denying its very insight. Thus Latin American philosophy appears under a double task: the accomplishment of human freedom through the recognition of the human in its historical circumstance as well as the engagement of this first task in the full awareness of the imposed sub-human categorization given to Americans by the same Western tradition. As Zea indicates, this double bind is unique to the peoples outside the Western modern project because the Western mind experiences the expansion of its unquestioned ideal over all other peoples as natural and practically invisible. Because, purely and simply, this man never questioned the facts. And it was so because he was never judged, there was no contra-conscience to confront his own. He was purely conscious of himself, not a consciousness displaced by another. Consciousness as such was his consciousness, his and that of those who whished to resemble it. This was not so for the Latin Americans.38

In Latin American history the question of humanity is found through the denial of that freedom and humanity, and therefore its reality offers a powerful site for the articulation of the question of human freedom from the distinct perspective of the ones who were excluded by inclusion. In short, according to Zea, it is the imposition of the Western model that spurs Latin American thought in its distinct path. The appropriative and transformative path of Latin American thought with respect to Western philosophy appears clearly articulated in the second point above. Given the inseparability of Western philosophy from Latin American thought, one might think that Latin American philosophy should take the form of Western philosophy. However, Zea’s point indicates a different relationship. All that was accomplished by Western thought becomes open to Latin American philosophers as tools that may be used to engage a reality other than the European reality and to articulate conceptual knowledge that is not the same as European philosophical knowledge. In the larger sense humanity holds together as one, and in this sense Zea is a traditional humanist. However, the use and results that occur from being in direct contact with Western philosophy do not delimit Latin American thought as continuous with or predetermined by Western philosophy in its form, questions, or conclusions. As the last point above indicates, to philosophize “and nothing more” as Latin Americans means to philosophize by asking the questions humans have always asked, which will find articulation and response out of the specific living reality in which they arise. Therefore, creativity

Question of a Latin American Philosophy | 31 will not come from a formal decision, from affirming or repudiating Western thought, but rather from the self-reflexive confrontation with Latin American reality. This suggests, furthermore, a radical appropriation of Western thought. If Western thought is inseparable from Latin American philosophy because of the very insertion of the Americas into Western history and through the development of modernity that defines the Americas as its other, the sub-human, this does not mean that Americans must follow the European patterns of existence. Rather, Zea finds in the inseparability a possible overturning of Western modernity. This means not only that Western ideals of the freedom and equality of all human beings can be put in Latin American terms but also that in such overturning, Western thought might itself find new paths and radical transformations. This last possibility becomes stronger in Zea’s later thought but must be emphasized here, since it anticipates one of the central conclusions of this book. More than Philosophy and Nothing More: Latin America’s Universal Recognition In the preface to Discurso desde la marginación y la barbarie (Discourse from Marginalization and Barbarism), written in 1988, Leopoldo Zea recalls the aim behind his 1957 work America en la historia (America in History): “In America in History my aim was to situate the history of Latin America within the context of universal history in relation to the order and planetary power of the center designated as the Western world.”39 This statement sums up the extent as well as the limit of Zea’s eruptive recognition of and call for a Latin American situated philosophy. However open and radical this call for a philosophizing “and nothing more” may be, a closer look at Zea’s point of departure reveals a clear limit on the extent to which in his thought Latin American philosophy can overcome its Eurocentric and Westernizing tendencies and lineages. First of all, as the quote above explicitly states, one of Zea’s central concerns in his work is to recognize the universal value of and the place of Latin American philosophy in the context of Western philosophy. Second, the very distinctiveness of Latin American philosophy results from the opening accomplished by Western philosophy in its uncovering of rational reflexivity and with it of the question of human freedom. It is by virtue of the Western question and conception of rationality that the Americans may ask for their humanity. The form of Western man and his life must not be copied, but a similar kind of thinking must be learned and repeated in the self-reflexive movement that recognizes humans historically and existentially as rational beings. We see this clearly when we pause on his understanding of creativity or originality (originalidad). As we just heard above, and as Zea writes in America in History (America en la historia), Latin America must aim “to participate in the creation and recreation of Western culture.”40 Thus, the key to the configuration of identities in Latin America is par-

32 | Identity, Dependency, and the Project of Liberation ticipation in Western culture. Here one already encounters Zea’s Hegelianism, in that he identifies the sense of existence that may have value with Western culture, that is, with the specific sense of culture as historically driven, as mediation between mind and nature, and thereby as creative in the sense of being universal. Zea explains, The Ibero-American has forgotten that the best way to incorporate oneself, not into European or Western history, rather into history as such [la historia sin más] is to imitate that very history in the aspect which various of the figures in the mental emancipation of Ibero-America pointed out: originality [originalidad].41

He then defines “originality” as the capacity of making what is one’s own something universal, valid for other men in situations similar to our own. A conscience Western man had since his beginnings, which was not content with only making valid his concrete expressions to those in situations similar to his own, rather, even, to those whose circumstances could be diametrically opposed. It was their conscience of Western history that made of their concrete situation a situation valid for all those who would accept being subordinate to it. The consequence of this conscience was the subordination to it of peoples that had not taken conscience of themselves, conscience of their own history.42

As we discussed above, at play in this sense of originality is a universality that arises from the self-conscious engagement with the particular. In situating the particular in a larger context one opens one’s understanding to other views and thus finds a universal plane. Thanks to this universal opening communication may happen, since one knows that one is not alone but with others. This is the hermeneutical moment in Zea’s philosophical thought. However, the quotation goes on to remind us clearly of the implications of the universal claims in Western thought. As Zea sees it, the universal view allows for expansion and ultimately for domination over others. What makes this relationship between the universal claim and power possible for Zea is not something inherent in the universal claim but the weakness of other peoples who have not accomplished selfconsciousness in the way Western philosophy has.43 Indeed, for Zea, the path of Western philosophy is the only path to dialogue between distinct peoples: “The same Western philosophy offers the elements for the inclusion of the excluded (enajenado).”44 Although in Latin American Philosophy as Philosophy and Nothing More, Zea outright rejects the Hegelian idea of a single universal history, he does sustain the sense of a progress made by reason that is not different from Hegel’s sense of human progress. What Latin America has not been able to do is progress toward dialectical knowledge. This is why Zea writes in America in History (1954) that Ibero-America is “outside of present history, outside of what Hegel called what ‘is and must be.’”45 This sense of what is and must be refers to Latin America’s incorporation into Western historical-metaphysical universalism. In the accomplishment of an American historical consciousness Latin

Question of a Latin American Philosophy | 33 America would participate in a universal consciousness, which up to that point would have been the accomplishment of Western history alone. In short, although in Zea we find a call that opens Latin American thought to its concrete situated undergoing, the ultimate aim does not manage to get beyond the assimilation of Latin American reality under Western historical rationalism, particularly the time line set up by the idea of the progress of humanity toward rational and critical self-representation. Here appears a question that Zea himself inaugurated in calling for a Latin American thought situated in its own difficulty and circumstance but that will not find a direct confrontation until later in the philosophy of liberation: What is the relationship between, on the one hand, the aggressive pattern of domination and the reduction of the other to the subhuman that marks the unfolding of Western power and, on the other hand, the way of thinking Zea considers necessary for Latin American philosophy to recognize the Americans as human and their thought as a contribution to universal human knowledge? Zea gives his own response at the philosophical—or, I would say, theoretical—level concerning the engagement of the concrete Latin American situation in Latin American Philosophy as Philosophy and Nothing More (1969). In this book Zea makes a differentiation between analytical philosophy and pragmatism, on the one hand, and historicist and existential philosophy, on the other. Zea sees in the first a kind of magic application of formulas detached from reality, which at the same time serves the expansion of Western domination over the world.46 Here Zea echoes the critiques of Ortega, Heidegger, Husserl, Marcuse, and so many others concerning the unfolding of philosophy as the support and justification of technology and capitalism. For Zea, the hope for peoples outside the Western machinery would ideally be a combination of this scientific rationalism and historicist consciousness (ideology).47 But it is clear to him that the logical school takes the historical existential thought as something extraneous and secondary to the rigorous knowledge necessary for overcoming underdevelopment in Latin America and other peripheral nations of the world. At the same time, Zea also sees in this distinction an important point that may check the blind expansion of Western rationalist instrumentalism—namely, the difference between the theoretical and its ground, that is, the historical, political, and existential basis on which and toward which the logical schools make their claims. Zea writes, “the hocus pocus of the supposed Western magic was and is founded by a reality which has permitted its domination over the world; which will not happen with this hocus pocus, as precise as it may be, if we are mere parts of its domination.”48 In drawing this differentiation between, on the one hand, a rationalist, logical philosophy and its calculative or instrumental expansion over the world and, on the other hand, ideology or a philosophy attentive to the historical and existential situation of peoples and lives, Zea identifies the difference between Western domination and

34 | Identity, Dependency, and the Project of Liberation an alternative path toward a distinct Latin American thought. “Historicism and the currents derived from it permitted a self-overturning of Latin American philosophy; a turn that presented a thematic diverse than that of Western philosophy.”49 The currents that Zea identifies include the “desterrados” (those exiled from Spain’s civil war who came to Latin America, such as José Gaos and Joaquin Xirau) and the thought of Ortega as well as Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Dilthey, Jaeger, Husserl, Cassirer, Heidegger, and Sartre.50 It also included the extensive development of works along these lines of thought through translation and commentaries in the famous Revista de Occidente. Finally, Zea turns to the work of the Venezuelan philosopher and student of Heidegger Ernesto Mays Vallenilla and his important work El problema de América (The Problem of America), an analysis which will occupy the end of this chapter. Zea’s argument, however, is not for the sake of drawing a separation between logical thought and historicismexistentialism. On the contrary, in the possible engagement of the first with the ample development of the latter, Zea sees that logic may be a crucial part of the liberation of Latin American thought from Western domination. However, he argues against excluding other configurations of existence in the name of logical positivism in its many appropriative, abstract forms. Thus, Zea’s conclusion includes the work of Octavio Paz, Camus, Sartre, Guillermo Francovich, the aesthetic movement in Mexico headed by Vasconcelos, the Mexican muralists such as Diego Rivera, and the poetry of Ramón López Verde. In short, Leopoldo Zea sees the turn of Latin America toward its reality in many ways of giving articulation to life, a necessary diversity of ways of understanding that configures an awareness that is at once born of its distinct situation and universal in its openness.51 As we will see in the next chapter, this understanding of a philosophy “and nothing more” as a philosophy of history will be identified as the limit of Leopoldo Zea’s thought by Salazar Bondy and Enrique Dussel. In Leopoldo Zea’s thought one finds an opening and an inherent contradiction that deepens our insight concerning the question of Latin American thought, its possibilities, and its limitations in light of that abyssal space we found in Simón Bolívar. Zea’s call for a situated Latin American thought seeks to raise the American to a universal level. He does this by recognizing as Latin American philosophy what has been a history of submission to Western patterns, forms of interpretation, and configurations of existence and also by recognizing the historical and existential reality of Latin America as the place from which to reinterpret Western ideals of humanity and freedom and, more importantly, as the reality from which Latin America may claim its voice, thought, humanity, and place in a universal community of world dialogue. The power of this opening cannot be overestimated, and Zea’s own recounting of the complex of inferiority that situates and directs Latin American philosophy up to the twentieth century must be evidence of the extent to which his call happened in a space in which little

Question of a Latin American Philosophy | 35 seemed possible beyond the various forms of submission under the power of Western culture and thought. As we saw, this is a fecund opening that invites not only the recognition of Latin American humanity and thought but also the transformative and creative appropriation of Western modernity out of the experience of the undermined humanity, of the oppressed and excluded. At the same time, true to that strange existence Bolívar points out, following a vision that takes him to chose the European over the indigenous, Zea takes a Western path toward liberation. For him Latin American philosophy is always Western philosophy, from its beginnings to the question of its universal validity in general and the recognition of Latin America’s humanity. To rise to humanity is to accomplish a critical self-reflexivity like the one accomplished by Western philosophy.52 The Western results would not be copied, but the form or way of thinking would be the same. Moreover, Latin America’s situation would have to be articulated through those specific forms of knowledge. If, as Heidegger reminds us, every question already has an answer in mind, and if thought occurs not as an objective event but out of existential dispositions and attunements, then the requirement for a Western beginning and for a place in Western thought for Latin American philosophy fall short of the call for thinking out of a concrete and existential Latin American reality. To cite a contemporary crucial example for the unfolding of Latin American (social, political, economic, cultural, and philosophical) consciousness, one may ask about indigenous Latin America, about the excluded peoples whose existence cannot be recognized by appealing to Western rational self-reflexivity and its patterns of representation. That excluded America will ultimately remain inaccessible to Zea’s thought. Indeed the origins of exclusion that underlie the question of the indigenous Americas, as well as of so many other peoples and lives under Western rationalism, will become evident only in the critical encounter between Leopoldo Zea and the Peruvian philosopher Augusto Salazar Bondy. As we will see later in the present book, this limit and the exclusion of indigenous thought is precisely what will be overcome by decolonial thought and the work of thinking in radical exteriority in all of its concrete levels, including a sense of the aesthetic that goes beyond Zea’s sense of culture as rational, historical mediation at play in the advent of progress. In the following chapter, before moving to discuss this encounter, I will begin by taking a moment to further explore the positive implications of Zea’s project, as it occurs in the development of a phenomenological analysis of Latin American existence by the Venezuelan philosopher Ernesto Mayz Vallenilla. This analysis will also prepare the way for the later parts of this book by providing the appropriate existential and phenomenological background for the reformulation of the engagement with Latin America’s situation that occurs with the foundation of the philosophy of liberation by Salazar Bondy and Enrique Dussel, among others, in the late sixties.

2

Existence and Dependency Ernesto Mayz Vallenilla’s Phenomenological Analysis of Being Latin American and Augusto Salazar Bondy’s Negative Critique of Latin American Philosophy

As we have just seen, at the heart of Leopoldo Zea’s thought appears Western philosophy as a creative force that results in the domination of other peoples and cultures who have not likewise developed their reflexive rationality. Two major Latin American philosophers who engage directly with the kind of existence that results from experiencing such domination are the Venezuelan Ernesto Mayz Vallenilla and the Peruvian Augusto Salazar Bondy. The first offers a deep phenomenological analysis of the abyssal existence Simón Bolívar introduces in his “Jamaica Letter” when he articulates the difficulty of Latin American existence. Salazar Bondy takes on domination directly and shows how it is the determining factor that up to the late sixties severs Latin American philosophers from their reality. Both philosophers, in their own ways, bring forth elements that will prove fundamental for understanding the development of Latin American thought. At the same time, as we will see, both of them ultimately remain wedded to Western thought by the very way in which they pose the issue of domination. In reading these authors, as well as throughout this book, I must emphasize that I do not believe that philosophical insights and the limits of a philosopher’s thought are mutually exclusive. As I understand it, philosophy is always questioning the very delimitations of meanings, sense, reason, and humanity.

An Early Phenomenological Account of Latin American Temporality as Existential Dependency: Ernesto Mayz Vallenilla One of the philosophers who receives much attention in the later part of Leopoldo Zea’s Latin American Philosophy as Philosophy and No More for his exploration into the historical and existential situation of the Latin Americans and his recognition of the particular universality of such experience is one of the founders of philosophy in Venezuela, Ernesto Mayz Vallenilla.1 His work comprehends the founding of one of the major universities in Venezuela, and his philosophical

36

Existence and Dependency | 37 work moves from the phenomenological analysis of the being-in-the-world distinct to Latin Americans (inspired by the work of his teacher Heidegger, the Dasein analysis in Being and Time) to extensive works on education and, later, technology.2 What interests us is his early work on the being of Latin Americans in his book El problema de América: apuntes para una filosofía americana (The Latin American Problem: Philosophical Notes for an American Philosophy).3 Echoing his own conclusions concerning the engagement of the Latin American situation from which philosophy may arise anew, Leopoldo Zea writes: “The Venezuelan philosopher concludes: To point out the existence of an originary ontological experience only means to clarify the presence of the American man in Universal History in his encounter with Being.”4 As Zea already indicates, to speak of the “concrete situation” of thought is not only to refer to our pragmatic situation; rather, in its more basic sense, it is to recall us to the ephemeral and singular ground from and against which we weave our configurations of all senses of being. In terms of Mayz Vallenilla’s analysis, to speak of the concrete situatedness of ideas will be to speak of the temporality that grounds experience and thought, that is, of that time or specific passing from which and as which human life and thought occur. We are not speaking, then, of primarily situating our conceptual heritage according to a pragmatically understood historiographical or lineal reality. Rather, Mayz Vallenilla’s aim is to recreate the sense of being Latin American from one’s distinct temporality, that is, from finitude in its distinct specificity. It is this approach to Latin American existence through its concrete temporality that distinguishes his contribution and that opens the question of temporality that, as we will see later in chapter 5 and thereafter, becomes central to the development of decolonial Latin American thought, central to the issue of thinking in radical exteriority and the aesthetic sensibility or sense of temporality that figures in those experiences. In 1957, in The Problem of America, Mayz Vallenilla gives an in-depth discussion of the temporal character of the American situation in relation to the possibility of a Latin American thought. He writes: What is the origin of the American experience of being? In its uncovering and clarification could lie the true program of an original philosophy. No doubt that in order to do this one would have to take into account the factum that the American has found himself existing in a new world and that this has played a preponderant role in the appearing of his peculiar historical conscience. But to take up the task in this way would be to reduce the whole attempt to a merely historiographical labor. Such project only of historiographical character and thus, reflexive and even secondary—should be accompanied by a more in depth and radical investigation. That would be a true historiology of our historical being. To turn to the origin of the experience of being that in turn determines our historical configuration, this means to auto-discover and illuminate our . . . origin. Through such labor we could begin and develop as we have said the true pro-

38 | Identity, Dependency, and the Project of Liberation gram of an original philosophy, since, in exposing the ontological experience of the American in his originary character [origeniaridad], new fields will open for the original determination of the sense of being.5

First of all, a crucial point in Vallenilla’s discussion is that American historical consciousness is not a matter of pragmatic historical facts. Rather, it is a matter of the American’s sense of being, which he understands as the fundamental temporality that situates the American historical consciousness and all the creative tasks Americans may perform. Vallenilla understands this basic structure of temporality in the American as ultimately originary in character (origeniaridad).6 A student of Heidegger, Vallenilla argues that experience is given for us in an ecstatic structure of time, in which the present occurs simultaneously and in light of a past, as well as in light of a sense of what is yet to come (el por venir). Based on this structure, he goes on to say that the American, in her temporal character, finds herself in a present situated by a quasi-absence.7 That is to say, the American never comes to be situated by a complete and absolute sense of her past; she does not have a full preterit sense. Following Mayz Vallenilla, one might compare this to a European historical consciousness where history is fully experienced, in the sense of being understood as a fully grounded and accomplished fact. For example, whereas few Frenchmen would question Napoleon’s French identity, at least since 1492 Latin America has had a double identity, which makes any claims of historical closure with regards to origins impossible. In this sense, Latin America remains beyond a fully determinable past. Americans, says Vallenilla, never encounter themselves through the experience of an absolute preterit experience because they never have a sense of a past that is completely their own. In turn, because of this same reason, they never have a full experience of their present. Thus, in Vallenilla’s words, to be American is to find oneself in the world through “a quasi-absent presence.” Vallenilla goes on to develop his analysis of the originary character of being American. He finds in the quasi-absence not only a lack of closure in the experience of the past but a certain “expectation” rooted in the experience of a “not-yet,” that which is yet to come.8 It is in uncovering this disposition of the American toward what is yet to come (in light of her incommensurable past) that one encounters the fundamentally originary character of being American. This means that in order to understand one’s originary character one would have to encounter one’s situation in two open ways: in relation to a past that is not closed and in experiences of identity that (although determinate) remain passages to senses of being yet to be configured. This is what Vallenilla indicates above when he says that “in exposing the ontological experience of the American in his originary character [origieniaridad], new fields will open for the original determination of the sense of being.”9 In short, this originary disposition toward the past and toward something indeterminate and yet to come is what situates American experi-

Existence and Dependency | 39 ence and thought in their dynamic circumstance and specificity. Here it is crucial that we keep in mind that the structure of temporality discussed by Vallenilla is clearly not what is particular to America: The point is that given this structure a certain disposition singular to the American historical consciousness may be discerned: the open, dynamic sense of Latin America’s historical consciousness. It is this open-ended departure in configurations of identities that distinguishes being Latin American. This point takes us beyond Vallenilla’s own ontological emphasis. It is not the being of Latin Americans, or a closed system of being, that is crucial for us in this discussion but rather the exposure of a concrete, temporal way of being, or temporality. We are speaking of taking up Latin American experiences in light of their open-endedness. Thus, one now may look to a creation of identities and recreation of lineages and traditions that do not require participation in Western onto-theological consciousness and its exclusive economy of recognition. Rather, at issue is engaging the concrete eventuation of configurations of identities in irreconcilable differences and transformative translations. The point is that in Western traditional thought certain ways of interpreting experience and giving it value become the sole origin and possibility for human knowledge: hence the word “exclusive.” The issue is then to open paths toward and find other structures of recognition, other ways of thinking about the world and encountering existence, other ways of articulating existence out of concrete and distinct experiences. As we will see now, Mayz Vallenilla’s thought ultimately will remain caught between these two ways of engaging experience and thought. At the end of the first part of his book, Vallenilla gives a heartfelt account of the experience of being and thinking in this eruptive situation. Given the open character of the temporality that informs Latin American historical consciousness, one’s situation is always “precarious.”10 As Vallenilla explains, this precarious sense of one’s situation appears with the impression of always being in imminent danger. I would say that this sense of impending wreckage, this vertigo, is the direct indication of the Latin American creative circumstance. To be in the open space of one’s originary existence is to be at the limit of one’s very senses of identity, world, history, and being; in a sense it is to be in the peripheral existence that remains barbarous or beyond being (“being” now understood in terms of what belongs to a closed world system, like that of modern Western philosophy).11 It is in this dangerous and difficult situation that one’s very living and its senses of existence are configured when one takes up the task of a Latin American originary thought. Indeed, in Vallenilla’s analysis we find a call for a situated hermeneutical creativity as a concrete attempt toward thinking in light of the quasiabsent presence in which one may configure senses of being and tradition by virtue of their re-creation or transformation. Moreover, one may think back to Simón Bolívar’s uncovering of the abyssal character of being Latin American. In

40 | Identity, Dependency, and the Project of Liberation Mayz Vallenilla’s analysis the abyssal situation is uncovered as a way of being, as the temporalizing movement and site, the time-space for the configuration of identities out of that distinct way of being in the world. Lastly, I must emphasize a point that will become central in later discussions in this book: Mayz Vallenilla’s analysis concerns a dynamic pre-linguistic and pre-conceptual ground in light of which something like subjectivity and conceptual determinations of senses of being and diverse narratives arise. His analysis opens the question of Latin American thought to the aesthetic dimension of thought, that is, to the distinct temporality and disposition that orient the very projectional horizon from which something like Latin American identity takes form as a distinct question.

Conclusion In his work Mayz Vallenilla’s thought goes beyond Zea’s universal philosophy of history. His analysis is not a philosophy of history that appeals to a historical reality or circumstance and finds a universality from a particular historical and cultural situation. Although Zea recognizes Mayz Vallenilla for his engagement with history and his sense of universality, after our discussion of the Venezuelan philosopher’s text, it is clear that the accent is on the engagement of the being of the Latin American. This means the latter engages a distinct modality of being. Mayz Vallenilla’s analysis articulates a sense of temporality that underlies historical fact, a specific experience of temporality that delimits consciousness, past and present, and therefore also how reality may be apprehended. He writes: Taking distance from any form of hope or fear, expectation does not succumb to the deception of believing itself capable of choosing or pre-determining values of any kind (be they positive or negative) with which to ‘determine’ coming reality. Expectation simply expects what is coming, and, in such mode, places existence in a mode of readiness to face what may occur, be it what may.12

Moreover, from this specific open and abyssal disposition will occur the configuration of identities and values that organize possible horizons of knowledge as well as the systems born from such understanding and undergoing of existence. And yet the discourse is again limited by a universalism that does not leave room for distinct differences. For Mayz Vallenilla, to be Latin American is to be in between in a totalizing way. This results from interpreting Latin American reality through the idea of a relationship to Being in general conceived by Western modern thought, that is, in terms of a single and authentic origin that is impossible for Latin American being and yet required for having a completed sense of existence. A configuration of identities out of lineages beyond that Being that takes its orientation from Western expansion and its interruption of other senses of existence does not seem possible.13 Beyond Being there is nothing certain, if one fol-

Existence and Dependency | 41 lows through the analysis of Mayz Vallenilla, but this uncertainty would be the African, the Islamic, the indigenous lineages. The problem is that in Mayz Vallenilla’s way of thinking the only way to make sense of distinct configurations of identities that arise beyond Western history, rationalism, and progress is precisely through their insertion into the time line of humanity as determined by Western domination. The limitation of Mayz Vallenilla’s analysis consists in the error of generalizing a distinct experience and assuming its universality by interpreting it as a manifestation of Being, Time a concept of Being Time that is inseparable from the history of Western thought. With this insertion of Latin American existence into Western thought Mayz Vallenilla repeats in his own way Zea’s move back to a Western articulation of the American situation. However, through his phenomenological analysis we do find an articulation of the abyssal being that Simón Bolívar recognizes and that Zea articulates in terms of the Latin American philosophy of history. Both philosophers contribute to a discussion that only begins to open the distinct consciousness and existence of Latin Americans and their possible articulations. As will become apparent throughout this book, these issues remain originary driving forces in the development of a Latin American thought and for the uncovering of its place with respect to world philosophies. In chapter 5 we will return to the question of temporality, but in a way that goes beyond Mayz Vallenilla’s way of thinking Latin American reality within the context of a phenomenological totality or Being.

Augusto Salazar Bondy: Self-Critique and the Recognition of a Colonized Consciousness In 1968, in his seminal essay “The Meaning and Problem of Hispanic American Philosophic Thought,” Augusto Salazar Bondy offers an historical critique of Latin American philosophy, aimed to open the path for a Latin American thought born of its specific situation.14 Putting directly into question Leopoldo Zea’s thesis, Salazar Bondy concludes that the history of Latin American philosophy has been a series of inauthentic ideas, characteristically a series of imitations and repetitions of European and North American ideas.15 But given Zea’s exposition of Latin American philosophy as philosophy and his attempt to place it in universal dialogue with Western thought, what would justify such a claim? And whence would such inauthenticity result? The difference between Zea’s position and Salazar Bondy’s may be phrased in terms of the acceptance or rejection of the history of Latin American philosophy.16 On the one hand, as we saw above, Zea understands the history of Latin American philosophy as an assumptive project, in the sense that in spite of its dependency and resulting deficiencies, Latin American thought is a kind of philosophy. Moreover, when the colonialism and romanticism of the past are acknowledged, they may be overcome, since it becomes impossible for the present

42 | Identity, Dependency, and the Project of Liberation philosophers to repeat the same mistakes. This is a kind of Hegelian dialectic that, instead of reaching a higher understanding of spirit, moves to construct new concrete grounds out of mistakes that cannot be repeated but that nevertheless are not abandoned by a total rejection. In short, for Zea the acknowledgement of the history of Latin American philosophy would amount to the liberation of a thought that is assumed for the sake of a new thought. By contrast, at first sight, Salazar Bondy seems to call for the abandonment of the past in the name of a thinking that remains wholly ungrounded and looking over an abyss. As Mario Sáenz has pointed out, this could translate into liberation from the past by, instead of affirming the present, remaining against what was. Thus the only available horizon takes the form of resentment.17 In such case critique may remain reactively fixed to the oppressive system, rather than performing a creative transformation such as the one Zea seeks. This characterization of the split sheds light on a differentiation I wish to keep as a central necessity in this book: namely, the difference between a way or disposition of thought that occurs as a reactive and resentful engagement with the colonial past and, in contrast, an active reappropriation of the past that has as its horizon and primary aim the affirmation of distinct thoughts, configurations of humanity, and the dignity of distinct lives. However, the characterization of the split between Zea and Salazar Bondy as a difference between appropriative affirmation and resentful rejection falls short of engaging the deeper and more fundamental change in the very assumption of Latin American reality when one moves from Zea to Salazar Bondy. The difference between them lies in the very place from which each begins to think of Latin America’s situation, in the level of experience or the kind of phenomena that they identify as the root of Latin America’s existence, and the kind of thinking such a sense of reality requires. Salazar Bondy turns to the concrete economic, social, and political realities that limit and determine Latin American culture, thereby engaging the meta-level that creates the asymmetry that (as Zea shows) grounds the very question and character of Latin American philosophy. With this turn, the Peruvian philosopher recognizes the colonialism and dependency that underlie even Zea’s call for a Latin American philosophy. Rather than abandoning philosophy’s task, Salazar Bondy begins from a distinct and powerful sense of the task ahead. Salazar Bondy understands philosophy as the result of a specific living community: “It [philosophy] cannot fail to be the manifestation of the rational conscience of a community.”18 As he explains, philosophy is “the conception that expresses the mode in which the community reacts before the whole of reality and the course of existence, and its [the community’s] peculiar manner of illuminating and interpreting the being in which it finds itself installed.”19 In other words, philosophy is the articulate expression of a living culture. And, as Salazar Bondy understands it, culture is “the organic

Existence and Dependency | 43 articulation of the original and differentiating manifestation of a community.”20 In this sense, culture would not refer to works of art, literature, and other such cultural artifacts, but these forms would be the organic articulation of a people’s lives, the expression of a distinct, living community. As Salazar Bondy indicates in his essay, because culture stands for the original and differentiating manifestation of a community, under culture we must now include the people’s frustrations, alienation, mystification, and authenticity.21 This means that philosophy arises from a rich and dense cultural existence, and it may be authentic only if there is an authentic cultural life to sustain it and require it. Inversely, we cannot forget that culture in its fullest living manifestation requires philosophical expression.22 Given this way of understanding philosophy, Salazar Bondy can conclude that the inauthentic character of Latin American philosophy arises from an inauthentic culture. “It is not strange that a community which is disintegrated and lacking in potential should produce a mystified philosophic awareness. . . . Our thought is defective and inauthentic owing to our society and our culture.”23 This lack of cultural authenticity is in turn the result not of a complex of inferiority, as Zea would have it. Rather the complex is a symptom of a malady that affects not only Latin America but also all “third-world” countries. The asymmetry and the complex of inferiority behind Latin American thought result from the systematic appropriation and domination of Latin America’s cultural existence by a series of nations that compose the world’s economic, political, and conceptual center of power. These nations, mother countries, and great industrial and economic powers develop in Latin America a “culture of domination.”24 It is because of such culture of domination that authentic culture and its thought remain impossible and that Latin American thought reveals “a misshaped society and a defective culture.”25 As the Peruvian thinker explains, “The dominated countries live with a view to the outside, depending in their existence upon the decisions of the dominant powers, that cover all fields of expression.” Then he adds, “This trait is not alien to the receptive and the imitative character of philosophy . . . that is typical of Hispanic America.”26 In his analysis Salazar Bondy brings the issue of Latin American thought (its identity and possibility) down from the realm of culture and history to the concrete situation of the elements that constitute a culture and its history; in this case we are speaking of the recognition of the domination of central powers and the perpetual destruction of Latin American culture sustaining the domination. In doing so, he shows us the origin of the complex of dependence Zea had already underlined.27 But, echoing in a challenging manner Leopoldo Zea’s project, Salazar Bondy concludes that given this culture of domination “there is no distinct cast of thought that could neutralize the receptivity and tendency to imitation” marking Latin American thought.28 Salazar Bondy’s essay closes with a distinct call for a movement that would be capable of “articulating itself with the rest of

44 | Identity, Dependency, and the Project of Liberation reality and provoking a change.”29 This would require the concrete recovery of Latin American cultural ground through the exposure and destruction of the structures of domination. In other words, the task of thinking would require the transformative creative move Zea had already indicated, but this would occur only through the destruction of the structures of cultural domination that have condemned Latin American consciousness to its limbo and its defective imitative and self-destructive attempts at self-articulation. We find here a series of insights as well as some basic limitations in Salazar Bondy’s formulation of a situated Latin American thought. First, he recognizes the intrinsic relationship between ideas and culture. There cannot be authentic thought without an authentic sense of our culture (broadly understood as the organic formation of a communities’ sense of existence). Yet culture has been destroyed by colonialist domination. Latin America suffers from a broken culture, and this is why there cannot be an original articulation of its existence at the level of philosophical thought. Here Zea’s call for turning to Latin American history and culture, his philosophy of history, is resituated in the context of a system of world domination that does not allow for the development of cultures or philosophies outside of its paradigm. Therefore, Zea’s turning to history and culture amounts to nothing more than a recovery in the name of a dominated narrative and reality. Zea’s turn cannot be a way out of the asymmetry of dependency from the West. Indeed, one could say that when Zea speaks of the origin of Latin American philosophy in an asymmetry that reduces Latin American humanity to the subhuman, he is either adopting a pattern created by Western colonialism or, in the best case, recognizing a problem that must be taken up at its root and undone—that is, if there is going to be a recognition of other ways of thinking and thereby a true world philosophical dialogue that is no longer captivated and formed by an asymmetric dependency. At this point, in light of Salazar Bondy’s analysis, the analysis of Mayz Vallenilla becomes problematic, since one may say that the abyss the Venezuelan finds in the being of the Latin American is not merely the way Latin Americans engage Being; it is the symptom of a colonialist world power that reduces humanity to a being-in-limbo or an in-between that ultimately amounts to nothing, rather than to a position of equality within a universal dialogue. Indeed, even Bolívar’s own observation may be seen as nothing other than the statement of a colonized mind which recognizes itself always in terms of its dependency to Western culture, to the point of feeling that Western ideals must be forced over indigenous cultures. The series of issues just outlined lead to a central conclusion: This culture of domination must be destroyed, and this must happen from inside Latin America.30 If we follow Salazar Bondy’s analysis we may then conclude that a Latin American situated thought must turn to the root problem behind Latin America’s cultural experience in order to articulate, challenge, and transform the very way we con-

Existence and Dependency | 45 figure and understand ourselves. This is a twofold task that involves both the interruption of the consciousness and structures that oppress us and the concrete recognition and configuration of an authentic Latin American thought. But how does the Peruvian philosopher understand the character of this task? While Salazar Bondy’s critique of Latin American philosophy puts in check Leopoldo Zea’s claims to the existence of a Latin American philosophy by exposing the cultural domination that underlies the history of Latin American thought, the Peruvian thinker himself remains wedded to Western philosophy in the way he approaches the question of colonialism and dependency. Salazar Bondy sustains an idea of a Latin American people’s authenticity that repeats the traditional Western essentialist vision of peoples as being determined by unchanging origins and identities. This view becomes highly controversial if not impossible to sustain when one considers that (as we discussed in the previous chapter) Latin Americans are not a homogeneous population. Not only does there appear a mixed race, as Vasconcelos points out in his famous Cosmic Race (La raza cósmica), but moreover, the criollos, the mestizos, the cholos, the Afro-Caribbean, and the indigenous peoples of the Americas in their many distinct encounters, lives, and cultures do not form a Latin American people with the same identity. Salazar Bondy’s sense of culture is inseparably linked to this issue and is therefore in question. One has to wonder in what sense, if not in the Hegelian sense of “culture” as historical mediation, the Peruvian philosopher sees the lack that sets up the insufficiency of Latin American thought. This tendency is clear when Salazar Bondy begins “The Meaning and Problem of Hispanic American Philosophic Thought” precisely by dismissing indigenous thought because, according to him, we only possess sufficient and reliable information about Latin American thought from the sixteenth century onward. He then goes on to point out that only from that century on do we find “definite philosophical cultural products.”31 In other words, one must ask: What is the sense of philosophy and philosophy as culture that is lacking according to Salazar Bondy? As we saw above, in his discussion Salazar Bondy exposes an organic sense of culture and a colonized culture, but this philosophical culture is not continuous with indigenous thought prior to the arrival of the conquistadors. It is not in question that the Americas enter European history at the point of the arrival; this certainly occurs. The question is whether the sense of history and culture that is established with that inceptive moment is sufficient to engage the American experiences in their originary and radical configurations. As we will see in chapter 7, even the inceptive moment of the arrival of the conquistadors may be read otherwise, in a transformative manner, when one begins to think out of the excluded experiences, such as those of indigenous peoples (understood in a broader sense). Even putting the question of culture aside, Salazar Bondy’s thought also follows a straight Western line in his ultimate conception of philosophy. This is made explicit by Zea’s response in

46 | Identity, Dependency, and the Project of Liberation Latin American Philosophy as Philosophy and No More to Salazar Bondy’s claim about the absence of Latin American philosophy. Responding directly to Salazar Bondy and pointing to the Peruvian philosopher’s approach, Zea writes and quotes him: Throwing overboard the whole of the history of philosophy, all of the history of ideas, history itself, the ideologies. Beginning like a new and naked Adam in a new and blossoming paradise. ‘Logic, epistemology, and language analysis,’ says Augusto Salazar Bondy, ‘find more and more cultivators who by virtue of the nature of their theoretical interest have a more rigorous and cool focus, a more technical one, if one will, than the content of knowledge; and they receive the influx of different circles of thought. . . . Here is inserted logical positivism, the analytical and linguistic schools, idonism, etc. . . . identified with the names of Bertrand Russell, Rudolf Carnap, G. E. Moore, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Gaston Bachelard, and Ferdinand Gonseth. This type of philosophy is notably growing in importance in Hispanic America in the last years as a result of the world development of science and technology, and also because of the predominance of AngloAmerican culture in the capitalist world.’ 32

Having quoted Salazar Bondy, Zea asks: Why so? It seems as if an experience in Latin America that should have already been assimilated, and therefore not to be repeated, repeated itself; the experience of positivism in the last quarter of the 19th century and the beginnings of the 20th century. . . . Now it seems that the argument repeats itself. Let’s assimilate the new logic that has permitted them to reach scientific and technological development in the United States and in the western world. . . . In one and the other argument the one from the positivists of yesterday and the one of those of today reality is forgotten, a reality that must first be changed so that positivism and the new logic may work among us.33

As Zea is quick and right to point out, Salazar Bondy’s thought finds the path for rethinking a Latin American philosophy in a rationalist logical analysis of Latin American economic, social, and political reality. The issue is no longer about culture, history, and the existential situation of the Americans. Now the question is that of the analytical critique and new construction of conceptual categories and normative structures of power that will set up the practical conditions for the building of an independent Latin American society. In light of Salazar Bondy’s analysis, Zea’s call for a return to the existence of the Americans appears naive, given that such existence is the result of logical structures of power. On the other hand, Salazar Bondy’s powerful uncovering of this logic of power and its rationale, as well as his call for new logical systems of education and values, leave behind cultural existence for the sake of a project led by the theoretical meta-analysis of the structures that should determine culture, subjectivity, and the very parameters from which an imaginary may arise that orients, situates, and ultimately makes possible any determination of identities. For Zea, the analytical approach repeats the attempt to change reality from above by im-

Existence and Dependency | 47 posing systems of knowledge arising from other experiences on Latin America’s reality, a reality that unless faced and re-appropriated in its own limits remains at best an obstacle for the systems already operative in North American and Western thought. As Zea sees it, Salazar Bondy’s way of engaging Latin American reality ends up failing the cultural and historical content that is the living Latin America, when the Peruvian philosopher attempts to create a new reality ex nihilo. By striking contrast, as we saw above, Zea finds that Mayz Vallenilla’s existential analysis of Latin American consciousness manages to touch the living experience from which configurations of being Latin American arise. In his essay Salazar Bondy touches on the existential dimensions in which and with which thought may take specific form. If we recall from our analysis above, the Peruvian philosopher concludes that in order to engage Latin American reality, it would be necessary “to include in anthropological terminology, at the social and cultural level, the concepts of frustration, alienation, authenticity, and mystification, without which the multiple varieties of historical existence may not be comprehended.”34 However, this insight is limited in Salazar Bondy’s own work by the path of his thinking. Turning away from the ambiguity of the ground from which thought arises (from life) to the conceptual level of experience, the Peruvian philosopher focuses on a formal level. As the development of his work shows, he will increasingly turn to an analytical approach that emphasizes the construction of a new system of categories that may orient a new education.35 In this sense a rationalist approach is prevalent in his thought. This follows from the fact that from the outset his analysis follows and is limited by two HegelianMarxist premises: that culture is always historical and therefore normative in its origin and essential character and that history articulates the essential character (spirit) of a people. The limitations of such an approach become evident if one pauses and wonders about the extent to which a new conceptual system may engage the radical abyssal experience in its existential and originary pre-rational movement which Simón Bolívar exposed one hundred years before. Here we are only touching, anticipating, an issue that will become central as it surfaces in the final part of this book: the aesthetic dimension of Latin America’s distinct and unbridled configurations of reality.

Bondy and Zea Beyond the Analytical-Continental Divide In 1969, in Entre Escilas y Caribdis (Between Scylla and Charybdis) Salazar Boudy writes concerning his thought: “By employing the most modern methods and techniques in thought, philosophy must become the critical instrument without which the true consciousness of our reality and of all reality is not possible.”36 These words invite a misunderstanding if merely viewed in terms of the contemporary divide in North American philosophy between continental and analytical thought. Although in the North American and Western academic philosophical

48 | Identity, Dependency, and the Project of Liberation climate of today the disagreement between Zea and Salazar Bondy may seem to be reducible to the difference between analytical and continental philosophy, between analytical reasoning and historical-hermeneutical thought, this would be too hasty a reading. Viewed from the position of Salazar Bondy, the issue does not concern a division between analytical and historical approaches. This is a crucial point Dussel has rightly emphasized by pointing out that neither he himself nor Salazar Bondy would be against an engagement with the history of philosophy and culture as we find it in Zea in order to recognize a Latin American philosophy. As Dussel often points out, for Latin American philosophy of liberation history is always part of the argument. Indeed, I must emphasize that the so-called break between analytical and continental philosophy sustained by Western philosophy from the middle of the twentieth century on has to do with an internal crisis within Western modern instrumental rationalism and should not be used to understand the Zea-Bondy debate or Latin American philosophy generally. This becomes clear when one looks more closely at the difference between Zea and Bondy. In order to do so we will look for a moment at Salazar Bondy’s essay “Philosophy and Ideological Alienation” (“Filosofía y alienación ideológica”) in Entre Escilas y Caribdis (Between Scylla and Charybdis).37 As Bondy clearly points out in his essay and as we saw in our discussion of his work above, the lack of a Latin American philosophy he identifies results from a dependency born from colonialism.38 As a result of this process Latin American culture becomes a false image of its reality by always projecting itself in light of a Western European and North American existential horizon. Because of this level of dependency, Leopoldo Zea’s recognition of a Latin American philosophy that occurs in Latin American culture remains ineffective at a critical level. That is, in exalting the appropriation of Western ideals in light of Latin American culture, Zea maintains an uncritical agreement between, on the one hand, a reality that is the result of coloniality and is taken as given and one’s own and, on the other hand, ideas that have been imported and copied from cultural necessity and growth, which do not refer to Latin American reality. In other words, to appeal to Latin American history and culture in order to seek something Latin American is to appeal to a colonized reality if one takes those levels of existence as given. Where Zea contributes greatly is when he points to the need to think from Latin America’s culture and reality. Salazar Bondy, however, goes further to engage critically that reality, that very situation. Instead of moving away from Zea, the Peruvian philosopher deepens his engagement with the concrete situation of Latin American philosophy. Salazar Bondy’s sense of philosophy is first and foremost critical in the sense that it demystifies Latin American existence by analyzing how the Latin American situation and its colonized consciousness are structured. This requires a manifold thinking that integrates phenomenology, philosophy of history, and

Existence and Dependency | 49 analytical thinking (epistemology and axiological thinking). The first two provide the ground for a reflection that cannot remain descriptive but must become critical in order to transform the Latin American situation of dependency, exploitation, and underdevelopment. This critical turn requires analytical reasoning capable of recognizing the values and logical structures that underlie colonized consciousness and the systems of domination.39 It is through analytical reasoning that these structures may be exposed and put into question and that new values and logical structures will appear. To appeal to indigenism, criollism, or any other ideal without this analytical critique would mean to leave untouched the strictures and delimitations of reality that will reduce any attempt at a liberating thought into another element within an already established configuration of reality.40 At the same time, Salazar Bondy himself warns about the way analytical reasoning may easily separate itself from the concrete reality of a people. Thus, for Salazar Bondy an analytical and normative critique of reality only serves if it happens in light of the concrete situation or reality of Latin America. We are speaking here of the distinct economic, social, political, and existential reality of those living in Latin America. However, this appeal to concrete and distinct experience is itself possible only through the rational articulation of that reality. Salazar Bondy is not thinking in terms of a universal analytical rationalism that will repeat Western modern instrumental universalism, nor is he appealing to history, culture, or a phenomenologically given existence that remains determining for a people’s existence and beyond rational analytical criticism. This call for a relentless, critical, situated thought has been misinterpreted as Salazar Bondy’s turn from phenomenology to analytical philosophy. Ultimately the Peruvian philosopher never fixes on either but, in a typically Latin American moment, refers to both by appropriating them into the distinct problematic of Peru (in Between Scylla and Charybdis particularly) and of Latin America.41 Salazar Bondy’s persistence with respect to history and existence as the foundations for a Latin American thought becomes apparent when in closing his essay on philosophy in Peru, he turns to enacting the kind of thinking he has in mind. The last section of “Philosophy and Ideological Alienation” (“Filosofía y alienación ideológica”) is titled “Thousands of Years Ago” (“Hace miles de años”), and he would publish it again in the newspaper Expreso in 1973. In this section he writes: Thousands of years ago the peoples who originally populated this country responded to the aggression of nature, to the challenge of a geography as hostile as few, creating cultures and societies of high development. They produced a plurality of spiritual expressions, revealing a culture rich in creative virtues; they created work systems and forms of social organization that are inexhaustible topics of study for anthropologists, sociologists, historians, and economists; and they began social experiences that have been a fountain of inspiration for many peoples.42

50 | Identity, Dependency, and the Project of Liberation Here Salazar Bondy turns directly to the history and cultural development in Peru and takes the forms of this concrete past as a source for his discussion of a horizon for a Peruvian as well as Latin American philosophical thought. But the issue is how he engages this history in order to recognize and recover what is Latin American, past and present. Salazar Bondy is clear about the fact that he is not speaking of indigenism.43 Instead, in his discussion he identifies specific principles and values that organized those people’s lives: At the basis of these historical accomplishments there were admirable norms and values of social ethics: the work-cult understood as a principle dignifying man and practiced as operations useful to society, the cooperation of all members of the community in the production of the goods necessary for living and the possession in common of the produced and of the tools of production. . . . These principles and values translated an inventiveness oriented towards the humanization of the geographical medium, a desire for rationalizing action, and the struggle to put the effort of individuals and of the state at the service of man.44

After interpreting these people’s history in its fundamental values and principles, Salazar Bondy introduces these same values in their historical and contemporary significance. As he points out, these are not merely values of sharing that are left in the past or merely practices that could or could not be repeated as part of a blind culture. But these were not only facts of the past. During centuries, throughout the captivity and marginalization the Spanish conquest brought with it, fighting again and again against material and legal oppression imposed by the voracious domestic oligarchies and their foreign associates, the majority of our people (pueblo) has survived thanks to the principle of mutual help and to the rationalization of the efforts that came from the past. This principle had even more force then, since it separated itself from the theocratic and classist burden sanctioned by the Inca regime, and acquired a deep sense of being a weapon of resistance and origin of social cohesion in the praxis of the indigenous communities still in existence to date.45

The recognition of the operative principles does not lead to a universal claim or an abstract discussion concerning arguments that may sustain or not sustain a particular value. This is not a recognition that depends on a purely rational, analytical discussion. What makes sense is a principle or set of principles that sustain life throughout centuries. At the same time, there is a rational requirement inseparable from life and community that may serve as a critical point in understanding history. Not all historical-cultural practices are acceptable. And, to speak in terms of the controversy with Leopoldo Zea, it is not the same to be a good student of the history of ideas who makes some transformation of the tradition (as does Zea) as to recognize principles that are fundamental to and underlie one’s “own” historical and cultural situation and which must be undone (princi-

Existence and Dependency | 51 ples that exercise direct effects over the possible affirmation or exclusion of one’s distinct knowledge and forms of life). It is not enough to add to the great project of History already in movement and in response to the concepts already articulated and principles useful to Western modernity in its articulation of existence. Salazar Bondy turns instead to Latin American, Peruvian, history and culture with an eye to the principles and rationalization of efforts that lead to the continuing of life in Latin American experience. His analysis begins from life and ends in life, and it is the affirmation of a people’s life in all of its complexities and levels that will be the test of reason. Salazar Bondy points to the negative aspect of his analysis of the principles he has discussed as he recognizes their dismissal in Peruvian culture: “To date, by virtue of ignorance or the interest of the dominating classes, this tradition has not been developed in its full potential.”46 Here Salazar Bondy turns to the exclusion of the principles he has recognized, an exclusion that only becomes apparent when his analysis shows the existence of specific principles that underlie history and culture. In short, holding to the inseparability of reason and historical and cultural phenomena, Salazar Bondy is able to articulate an alternative view of society, intersubjectivity, and the value of the subject in light of the principles found in Latin American experience.47

Some Conclusions Looking beyond the Two Approaches We have found, at this point, at least three fundamental moments in the attempt to think from the Latin American situation: Zea’s turn to history and culture, Mayz Vallenilla’s existential engagement with a pre-rational disposition and experience of temporality that situates Latin American consciousness with respect to its determinations or configurations of being, and Salazar Bondy’s rationalist critique and re-situation of the first two thinkers in the context of a world system of power, domination, and dependency (in the case of the non-Western colonized peoples and countries). In the coming chapters these approaches will lead us deeper into the Latin American philosophy of liberation and thereafter into the question of coloniality, power, and knowledge as they surface in Latin American thought. At the same time, as we will see, the abyssal character of Latin American existence, the fecund existential diversity that constitutes it, and the existential experience of being Latin American beyond Western rationalism will resurface. These, together with the exposure, resistance, and undoing of colonialism and colonized consciousness begun by Salazar Bondy and the philosophers of liberation, will give rise to a Latin American thought that opens onto a decentering of Western philosophy and toward new spaces for world-philosophical dialogues.

3

Latin American Philosophy and Liberation Enrique Dussel’s Project of a Philosophy of Liberation

In the previous chapters we found a call for recognizing Latin American philosophy, which may be traced back to the 1940s and 1950s in the work of Leopoldo Zea, along with other Latin American philosophers such as Arturo Ardao in Uruguay and Francisco Romero in Argentina. For these philosophers the fundamental questions were those of the identity, sense, and possibilities of a Latin American philosophy. As discussed in chapter 2, Salazar Bondy responded to these questions in 1968, and Leopoldo Zea engaged with that negative critique in 1969 in Latin American Philosophy as Philosophy and No More.1 Latin American philosophy of liberation arose as a response to the issue of dependency we found so clearly presented by Salazar Bondy as well as in light of Leopoldo Zea’s call for the recognition of Latin American philosophy in its historical and cultural dimensions.2 The first gestations of the movement occur through a series of encounters between mostly Argentine philosophers in 1968 and 1969. This group of young Latin Americans sought to develop a thinking that would respond to the concerns we have been discussing, and they did so in light of the then-new developments in sociology and economy of world-system theory and dependency theory by the Argentine economist Raúl Prebisch and by the American Jewish sociologist Immanuel Wallerstein (discussed below). They met to discuss their ideas at a series of philosophical encounters in Santa Rosa de Calamuchita, in Cordoba, Argentina. The final project first took form during the first Semana Académica of the Universidad del Salvador in 1970, in Buenos Aires, Argentina.3 Although the theme at the time was “Argentine thought,” from this meeting a series of papers resulted that had great repercussion at the Primer Congreso Argentino de Filosofía in March of 1971. As a result the second Semana Académica of the Universidad del Salvador, in 1971, focused directly on “Latin American liberation.”4 Among the founders of the movement were (to name a few) Osvaldo Ardiles, Alberto Parisi, Juan Carlos Escannone, Mario Casalla, Carlos Cullen,

52

Latin American Philosophy and Liberation | 53 Rodolfo Kusch, Horacio Cerutti Guldberg, H. Assmann, Arturo Andrés Roig, Augusto Salazar Bondy, and Enrique Dussel. Leopoldo Zea and Arturo Ardao would eventually contribute to one of the historical editions of the first journals in which the philosophy of liberation became publicly known.5 Of the group, the work of Enrique Dussel would make the most impact and be most immediately associated with the movement throughout Western philosophical circles. This was the case in spite of internal controversies within the group, which reflected the self-critical character of the movement from its beginnings. These controversies are well documented as early as 1977 in Hector Cerutti Guldberg’s Filosofía de la liberación latinoamericana (Philosophy of Latin American Liberation).6 We will discuss these controversies and their significance for a Latin American thought of liberation in chapter 4. For now my aim is to show how Dussel’s thought takes further the call for a philosophy born of the concrete Latin American reality and in critical awareness of the problem of dependency.7 As we will see in the following pages, Dussel’s thought shifts the very situation from which the idea of philosophy is understood and from which philosophical ideas arise. For Dussel philosophy is always concerned with its concrete situation, and a liberatory philosophy may only be born from the articulate expression of the lives of the excluded, oppressed, exploited, and colonized peoples of the earth. Moreover, for Dussel, as for Salazar Bondy and Zea, history as well as the possibility and need of developing new categories and ways of thinking are not mutually exclusive, and they are necessary for developing a new and liberated Latin American thought. In his work Dussel uses a mixture of phenomenology, hermeneutics, analytical philosophy, critical theory, a renovated Marxism, and theology. He also recognizes the historical roots of modernity in the colonization of the Americas and, through this, in Islamic, Jewish, Asian, and African philosophies. Indeed, from the outset, Dussel seeks to open a space for these philosophies to meet on an equal ground in order to begin what he has come to call in his later thought a “transmodern pluriversal dialogue” among world philosophies. This chapter is divided into two parts. The first discusses the development of Dussel’s thought and the implications of his work for understanding the very task of philosophy as arising from Latin American or non-Western thought. The second part exposes Dussel’s underlying aesthetic sensibility.8 This is an aspect of his thought that the Mexican-Argentine philosopher does not address in his work and that also remains beyond Dussel’s thought by virtue of the way he approaches the question of radical exteriority. The second part shows the need for an aesthetics of liberation and how the lack of such an aesthetics presents a problem for Dussel’s whole political and ethical project. The limits of Dussel’s articulation of his own insight concerning a philosophy from below are the focus of chapter 4.

54 | Identity, Dependency, and the Project of Liberation

Dussel’s Philosophy of Liberation The Call for a Philosophy of Liberation As we have heard, throughout the history of Latin American thought echoes a call to set out toward a Latin American articulation born from its very “situation.”9 Enrique Dussel’s work recommends direct engagement with the destitute and peripheral existence of the oppressed people of the earth. His concrete analysis calls for a profound encounter with the absolute exteriority of the other as the distinct situation from which originary thought may arise. Like Salazar Bondy, Dussel sees that Latin America and the countries in the periphery of the central powers suffer a cultural and existential oppression that makes it impossible for them to do more than repeat and imitate the culture of the center. In his classic work from 1977, Philosophy of Liberation, Dussel writes that philosophy of liberation is the philosophy of our reality seen from beyond the perspective of the political, economic, and military powers of the center. Then, he refers directly to Fanon and concludes: “its [the philosophy of liberation’s] reality is the whole earth . . . ‘the wretched of the earth.’”10 This means that liberation is the praxis that may be revealed only out of the life of the oppressed peoples of the periphery (for example, the woman isolated by masculine ideology or the subjugated child.)11 This praxis of liberation happens through a radical change, a shift in our consciousness’s orientation and in the very way we situate ourselves and the world. We must move away from the appropriating, onto-theological Western tradition, which sees itself as the central consciousness with everything at its disposal, available for its judgment. This central rationality operates as a perpetual conquering agent that may name, define, allocate, and manipulate all that it chooses to call being while excluding the rest as non-being.12 This is the distinctly oppressive and appropriative disposition expressed by the history of Western philosophy and its logical ontology. By contrast, Dussel seeks to develop a sense of thought and identity situated by one’s concrete experience, which for liberation philosophy means the experience and histories of those at the periphery of the central political, economic, and military powers. We are speaking of a thinking situated by experience, particularly in light of those whose lives cannot be subsumed, consumed, and turned into the commodious other of the center. This last observation leads us back to the three basic insights we already found in Augusto Salazar Bondy’s analysis of dependency, particularly the basic emancipatory moments required for a situated Latin American thought. First, Salazar Bondy recognizes the intrinsic relationship between ideas and culture. There cannot be authentic thought without an authentic sense of culture (broadly understood as the organic formation of a community’s sense of existence). Second, Latin America suffers from a broken culture, and so there cannot be an original articulation of its existence at the level of philosophical thought. This cultural

Latin American Philosophy and Liberation | 55 failure results from the culture of domination by the central political and economic powers that figure the geopolitical and conceptual center of the world under which Latin America and the third world exist. In other words, before one finds a culture to identify with, the way of thinking about the world has been coopted and the culture has been Westernized. Last, this culture of domination must be destroyed, and this must happen from inside Latin America.13 If we follow Salazar Bondy’s analysis we may conclude that a Latin American situated thought must turn against the basic colonizing elements that orient Latin America’s cultural experience in order to articulate, challenge, and transform the very way we configure and understand ourselves. This is a twofold task: on the one hand, it involves the interruption of the colonized consciousness and colonizing structures that oppress us, and on the other hand, it seeks the concrete recognition and articulation of Latin American experience and thought. We will now see how philosophy of liberation in the work of Enrique Dussel offers a path toward such liberated thought. Before moving on I should point out that through the discussion in this introductory section we have moved from Simón Bolívar’s sharp characterization of the place or displacement of the American to the recognition of that displacement under the domination of the center. My aim in this section has not been to present a set of problems I expect to resolve but rather to recognize the history of our Latin American situation. In the brief discussion we encounter complexities inherent in Latin American thought, and in this sense we have begun to engage that thought. It is this experience and thought, with its own forms, fitting difficulties, and aims, that we may seek as we look toward a Latin American situated thought in the philosophy of liberation.

Toward a Concrete Latin American Philosophy: Dussel’s Reading of Martin Heidegger and Paul Ricoeur In a lecture titled “Towards a Philosophy of Culture” (“Para una filosofía de la cultura”), given in Buenos Aires in 1969, Dussel writes, It is by now habitual to say that our cultural past is heterogeneous and sometimes incoherent, not up to par, and in a certain sense marginal to European culture. But what is tragic is its unknown existence; since what is relevant is that anyhow there is a Latin American culture. Even if some deny it, its originality is evident, in the arts, in its living style.14

The issue here is a lack of sense of Latin America, fed and sustained by standards and expectations directed by European culture and civilization. The question is how Dussel begins to move toward thinking beyond this epistemic trap. When one looks at the transcript of Dussel’s course dictated in Mendoza, Argentina, a year before (1968), it is clear that he finds a way toward the liberation of philosophy and Latin American culture from the Western tradition in Martin Hei-

56 | Identity, Dependency, and the Project of Liberation degger’s Being and Time.15 Indeed, it is Heidegger’s thought that serves as a fundamental insight for Dussel’s development in such crucial work as Para una de-strucción de la historia de la ética (Towards a De-struction of the History of Ethics).16 At the same time, Dussel’s call for the de-struction of the history of ethics comes from his distinct consciousness about the imperialist invasion of Latin America by Western and North American interests, a military, economic, social, cultural, and intellectual appropriation that calls for a recovery and defense of Latin American existence. The Mendoza lectures take Heidegger’s analysis of Dasein’s being-in-the-world in Being and Time as a pivotal point for understanding the task of philosophical thought. This understanding concerns two questions: What sense does the history of Western ontology have for Latin America? And, how does one understand the sense of being human beyond the Western ontological tradition? Or, how does one begin to articulate the being of Latin Americans beyond the cycle of colonialism and dependency? The answer to these questions is found in the shift from the treatment of the human as an entity among other entities in a world that has forgotten the authentic sense of being human to the human understood in its situated experience, that is, by “being-there” (Dasein) or being-in-the-world in an authentically historical manner.17 This authentic being-there (which involves a deeper sense of our existence and temporality) means recovering a sense of being that has been overshadowed by our involvement with the immediate worldly things and concerns. This forgetting has covered over the authentic sense of our existence as our openness toward past and future that allows us to claim our sense of being out of a concrete being-there.18 Furthermore, the forgetting involves a system of knowledge that covers over authentic ways of being human. Therefore, this remembering will require the destruction of the Western ontological tradition, of what Heidegger called the history of Western metaphysics.19 Here we have the first response to the leading questions above: The tradition must be destroyed in order to recover our authentic ways of being. In terms of Latin America, this is the way the history of Western philosophy must be engaged: the latter must be destroyed for the sake of a more authentic historical way of being. Dussel writes, Our de-structive task, to annihilate forgetting in order to have the sense of being reappear, must know to choose some fundamental and decisive epochs and moments in history and within cultural horizons that may not be excluded in order for us to arrive at the comprehension of ourselves. This under-standing is at the bottom or is the foundation for all authentic thinking; on it does not only depend my personal project, but equally the collective destiny of “my” people (“my” us) [“mi” pueblo (“mi” nosotros)] . . . As the Latin Americans that we are, we must know to choose the history of the peoples that builds us (the cultures) and in them [the peoples] the essential historical moments.20

Dussel finds in Heidegger’s hermeneutical and transformative reading of the tradition, in the fundamental analysis of Dasein, and in Heidegger’s sense of a his-

Latin American Philosophy and Liberation | 57 torical sense prior to historiography a path for the recovery and configuration of Latin America out of the specific Latin American situation. As we will see in the next chapter, the issue of the “people” (pueblo) will have already become a central point of contention among the philosophers of liberation by 1977, the year of the publication of Dussel’s seminal Philosophy of Liberation. Before moving on, I must note that here one finds how Dussel shares Heidegger’s approach to temporality with Mayz Vallenilla. However, in their proximity the difference between the two Latin American philosophers becomes evident. Whereas for Mayz Vallenilla temporality means being left in limbo between loss and hope, in Dussel the call for authenticity through engaging one’s concrete temporality opens the path for the destruction of the pernicious pattern of self-interpretation through Western structures of thought perpetuated by Latin American dependency and colonialism. At the same time, as we will see below when we discuss Dussel’s sense of “proximity” and “radical exteriority,” the insight in both philosophers ultimately will remain with the existential character of being Latin American. Another major element in Dussel’s thought is Paul Ricoeur’s Histoire et vérité and his participation in Ricoeur’s course at the Sorbonne.21 Dussel identifies an earlier version of Ricoeur’s thesis in this work as crucial to Dussel’s thinking in the late sixties (“Civilization universal et culture national,” published in the journal Sprit).22 Dussel finds in Ricoeur’s essay the insight that all civilization precludes a cultural life that projects and manipulates the objects of civilization. In other words, meaning comes from living praxis and the values and symbols that arise in a particular group. Dussel writes concerning Latin America: “A people that comes to think itself, that reaches self-consciousness, the comprehension of its cultural structures, of its ultimate projects, in the cultivation and evolution of its traditions, has its identity with itself.”23 This means that to think one’s beingthere in its historical authenticity will require engagement with cultural (and religious) structures out of the praxis of the particular culture. I must add that such an engagement is not a blind production of populist culture. Dussel is clear that the manifestation of such culture requires its distinct articulation, and this articulation befalls a few people: “There will always be a group, an elite that will be charged with the task of manifesting the community in works.”24 This is a crucial point to understand the role of the philosopher in the philosophy of liberation. Unlike the “intellectual” in the traditional communist state of the last century, the elite’s task is to manifest the people’s voice, not to determine it or decide for it. (In the next chapter, this ambiguous position of the philosopher as part of an elite that listens will prove to be problematic when we engage Dussel’s critics and, through them, the limits of his thought.) A distinct example of this structure of representation is Sub-Comandante Marcos’s transmission of the decision taken by the elderly council as well as Dussel’s own work in helping to draft

58 | Identity, Dependency, and the Project of Liberation a new constitution for the free government of Bolivia, a constitution that presents and responds to the presence and needs of the indigenous population as well as the rest of the people of Bolivia. Following Ricoeur, Dussel sees that culture may be understood as the valuegiving mythical content of a culture and such value-giving occurs through the configuration and development of identities through mythical narratives.25 This insight will lead Dussel to develop a hypothetical method of studying Latin American history that situates Latin America by looking at a kind of proto-history and, through this recognition, brings Latin American thought into a world perspective.26 Proto-history situates Latin America within the process of human development beginning from the homo species and progressing through the Neolithic and Paleolithic periods and the migrations of peoples from Mesopotamia and Egypt to India and China and across the Pacific.27 This reconstruction of Latin America recognizes encounters with the Indo-European and the EuroAsiatic (among them Greeks and Romans) and the latter’s encounter with the Semites (mostly from the Arabic desert).28 Ultimately, Dussel’s cultural-historical thesis traces the “ethical-mythic-nucleus” that will pass through the Byzantine and Muslim worlds to its arrival to the Iberian Peninsula. He calls this path “the other source of Latin American proto-history.”29 As is evident, already at this early point in Dussel’s work one finds that the horizon of the philosophy of liberation is not Latin America but the histories, peoples, and myths that have been excluded from or considered secondary in the development of the Western historical tradition. Already in the mid-sixties Dussel calls for a “plurivalence” that may reorient our sense of history and ultimately humanity. In recognizing Latin America’s proto-history Dussel points to the non-Western origins of distinct identities that arise in mythical-ethical configurations of human life.

Proximity and Radical Exteriority: Another Point of Departure beyond the Central Culture of Domination Dussel’s turn beyond phenomenology is explicit in his collection of essays published in 1973, which covers his work from 1962 up to that point. The collection is titled América Latina: dependencia y liberación (Latin America: Dependency and Liberation). Dussel’s critical shift is clear particularly in the section titled: “Nuevo Momento (1971–),” or “The New Moment (1971–).”30 The move away from Heidegger and beyond the phenomenological horizon of Being is also clearly discussed in Towards an Ethics of Latin American Liberation (1973).31 As Dussel points out in this work, at this point in the development of his thought, the Mendoza course in its final form (under the title Para una de-strucción de la historia de la ética, or Towards a De-struction of the History of Ethics) seems the fitting introduction to what is new in Towards an Ethics of Latin American Liberation and goes beyond the earlier Heideggerean analysis.32 The introductory character

Latin American Philosophy and Liberation | 59 of the earlier work refers to the fact that the book does begin by presupposing the de-struction of the tradition Dussel has found in Heidegger. The move beyond Heidegger occurs as Dussel engages the thought of Emmanuel Levinas, particularly the differentiation the French philosopher makes between the totality of a closed Western philosophical system and the infinity he finds in the concept of alterity or “the other.” The turn arises from Dussel’s reading of Levinas’s Totality and Infinity33 and his participation in a seminar with Levinas in Louvain in 1972.34 In Levinas’s sense of alterity Dussel finds an opening for understanding his own situation as a Latin American philosopher who not only participates in world philosophy but does so out of a distinct situation: from alterity, from the experience of being the excluded and the sense of existence that results. This is the experience of being outside a totality that recognizes one by overdetermination, silencing, and exclusion and ultimately by considering one as non-human and thus as non-being. If previously Latin America figured a search for a cultural identity (as we saw in the case of Zea, for example), and if Dussel in his earlier work had situated this identity in the grand scope of the history of humanity (with his historical thesis), now Latin America and its thought find a concrete position, a locus enunciacionis, from which a new philosophy may arise. Latin America takes its place among “les damnés,” the damned, the colonized and exploited peoples of the earth. Echoing Fanon, Dussel concludes concerning philosophy of liberation: “its reality is the whole earth . . . ‘the wretched of the earth.’”35 Here it is crucial to be attentive to where one places the accent: Latin American culture is not only historical and in that history an exploited and oppressed culture; it is a culture of the oppressed. It consists of living others who, in spite of their subjugation, have lives and histories of their own outside the ruling determination of dominant systems internal and external to Latin America. Against the totalizing thought of Western ontology appears the other’s life, a life that will call into question the center’s claim to ethical ends and also its sense of justice. But for Dussel the enunciation of the other is not exactly the same as for Levinas. This is indicated by the fact that Dussel uses Fanon’s term “les damnés,” the wretched of the earth, when speaking of those lives that inspire his philosophy of liberation. The difference is that whereas Levinas articulates otherness as an abrupt break with the ontological totality that orients Western thought and situates all senses of being within its system of meanings, Dussel, in thinking from the abyssal situation—from the in-between we found already as distinctly Latin American in Simón Bolívar—sees alterity as a place of proximate exteriority (not of absolute alterity). As Dussel puts it in Método para una filosofía de la liberación (Method for a Philosophy of Liberation), “Levinas always speaks of the other as ‘the absolute other.’ He tends toward equivocation. Besides, he has never thought

60 | Identity, Dependency, and the Project of Liberation that the other could be Indio, African, or Asian. . . . Not even Levinas has been able to transcend Europe. We are the ones born outside, we have suffered it. Suddenly poverty becomes wealth!”36 The emphasis here is not on local identity but on the actual experience of existing in that double space and time of identities wrought with a sense of proximate exteriority, such that one remains in between cultures, histories, lineages, and memories in a play of unsettling, diverse, and thereby diversifying origins. As we will see in the coming chapters and conclusion of this book, this sense of alterity or exteriority that remains inseparable from the conqueror and yet does not appear available to totalizing domination will not only open a radical possibility for Latin American philosophy; it will also open new spaces for rethinking the very sense of philosophy. For Dussel the exteriority of the excluded will figure a strategic place from which the totality constructed by Western thought may come undone. In other words, in not claiming a total exteriority (a sense of exteriority without any connection to the center or dominator’s existence), Dussel begins to open a space of radical exteriority that bears a powerful creativity from beyond and yet toward the radical transformation of the system. Dussel—from his situation, in light of his abyssal “Latin American” situation—here goes beyond Levinas’s “exteriority” in order to produce a philosophy, ethics, and politics of liberation from the “relative exteriority” of the system, something Levinas never imagined and was unable to produce. Looking ahead, I must emphasize this point: Dussel’s aim is not to abandon ethical principles or the task of constructing political institutions; he is also not interested in mere reforms of the systems of oppression. Rather, Dussel sees the necessity of such conceptual and practical structures for the sake of the liberation of the wretched of the earth and also has clear the fact that the institutions must begin to work for people’s lives.

Analectical Thought In the closing pages of Philosophy of Liberation Dussel calls his thinking “anadialectical” and goes on to explain what will eventually be called his analectical thinking. The word literally sets out a plan: “ana” means “from exteriority,” “dia” means “unfolding,” and “logos” figures the comprehension of a new horizon.37 Thus, the aim of liberation philosophy is to unfold the comprehension of a new horizon from one’s specific exteriority. But given the Latin American situation, this unfolding requires a double movement at once critical and affirmative. By this I mean a critical engagement with one’s situation that allows for recognizing it in its oppressive strictures and subsequently beginning to articulate distinct Latin American experiences. As Dussel explains, this means thinking the Latin American situation in its fundamental di-symmetric reality by articulating it through a contrast between center-periphery, dominator-dominated, capitalwork, and totality-exteriority.38 Such thought seeks to affirm the existence of the

Latin American Philosophy and Liberation | 61 oppressed as oppressed but, in doing so, also seeks to unfold at least the space for thinking in light of a people’s fecund life.39 For example, in the section on history at the beginning of Philosophy of Liberation, Dussel contrasts the historical mindset of the center with that of the oppressed. This turn to the history of the oppressed exposes one to historical perspectives and a manner of seeing existence that can be distinguished from the oppressor’s: One faces concrete situations which may be not only critiqued but ultimately concretely destroyed. This last moment occurs when the oppressive determination of one’s consciousness and culture is no longer fitting to one’s understanding of reality. In other words, through this exposure to other histories and ways of thinking one becomes conscious of existence beyond Latin America’s culture of oppression imposed externally (from the center) and internally (by Latin American oligarchies). In this sense, the turn toward the Latin American situation lets us see the senses of being in the periphery, beyond the allocation of meaning and meaninglessness imposed by the central powers. But this ultimate exposure to exteriority or peripheral ways of being does not only refer to an immediate and unquestionably political and social struggle, nor is it restricted to Latin America. As Dussel sees it, all genuine philosophical thought (including Western thought) has arisen in relation to a center but with a view to an exteriority that places it always beyond the center. “The philosophy that has emerged from the periphery has always done so in response to a need to situate itself with regard to a center and a total exteriority [ante el centro y ante la exterioridad total].”40 Indeed, this is the way original or authentic thought has always occurred, even in its “Western” beginnings: as a thinking over and against the violence of the center but from a periphery, from a total exteriority.41 The sense of “total” here does not mean a severing from the modern Western tradition, but it indicates the possibility to speak in light of one’s distinct life, from the place of experience that is life beyond the system’s grasp, calculation, manipulation, and control. In the case of the philosophy of liberation, we are speaking of life in its configurations beyond modern Western European and North American hegemonic utilitarian thought and its project of progress under infinite production sustained by the normalization of peoples and all senses of being and ways of engaging existence. Dussel writes, “Only those who can interpret the phenomena of the system in the light of exteriority can discover reality with great lucidity, acuity, and profundity.”42 Thus, a situated thought for Latin America would have to set out from its concrete situation and recognize its radical exteriority. At the same time, in the conscious undergoing of sense in light of specific exteriority, such thought would take two very distinct forms. On the one hand, it becomes the critical transformative reality that puts in question and figures the undoing of the systems of power and knowledge. In this sense total exteriority is already a radical exteriority, being from outside the system and yet unavoidably transformative with regard to the system. On the other

62 | Identity, Dependency, and the Project of Liberation hand, such exteriority opens philosophy to other ways of being and demands that the discipline remain open to otherness in a manner impossible for the close systems of the ontological tradition. A brief look at Dussel’s thoughts on the occasion of the centenary of the arrival of Columbus to the Americas may offer the opening implications of his analectical thought. In 1492: The Covering of the Other Dussel rethinks modernity in light of the historical character of its narrative or mythical development. In this work is apparent that Dussel does not wish to abandon rationality but rather to rethink it beyond the terms of rationality versus irrationality as constructed by Western, modern, Eurocentric philosophies. On the one hand, modernity has an element of rationality that Dussel wants to sustain. On the other hand, this rationality is inseparably entangled in modernity, with the irrationality of having rational consciousness serve as a justification for violence, that is, for the colonization of the Americas and the later development of Western colonialism. The critique of modernity appears as an attempt to expose this irrational element of violence, of conquering and subjugating peoples and lives. This critique is not conceptual in the analytical sense per se but rather historical. In short: in order for the modern consciousness to arise as the center, it must sacrifice other distinct configurations of lives beyond it and make them its other. The modern Western mind arises through violently appropriating other histories, cultures, and lives and reducing them to lower and dependent forms of life. As we will see in chapter 5 when we discuss the coloniality of power and knowledge, the other of the Western rational mind is not naturally given but is constructed through the development of a system of world-power and knowledge. It is as a result of the recognition of the other that the rational mind recognizes itself. In this sense the colonized, excluded, exploited, and ultimately sacrificed are the inseparable lives at the heart or the dark side of modernity. This historical recovery of the other figures a path toward what today Dussel calls the philosophy of “trans-modernity”: once the myth of modernity comes undone, a new philosophy of liberation arises beyond modernity. The term also indicates that this is not a philosophy that abandons reason but instead one that resituates rational thought in terms of the concrete existence of the other. A citation from Dussel’s “A New Age in the History of Philosophy: The World Dialogue between Philosophical Traditions,” from his book, manuscript Anti-Cartesian Meditations, may serve to illustrate succinctly the breadth of his project.43 European Modernity has impacted cultures throughout the world through colonialism (except for China, Japan, and a few others, who were spared from direct European rule). It exploited their resources, extracted information from their cultures, and discarded what it could not absorb. When I speak of Trans-modernity, I am referring to a global project that seeks to transcend European or North American Modernity. It is a project that is not post-modern, since post-Modernity is a still incomplete critique of Modernity by European and North America. Instead, Trans-modernity is a task that is, in my

Latin American Philosophy and Liberation | 63 case, expressed philosophically; whose point of departure is that which has been discarded, devalued, and judged useless among global cultures, including colonized or peripheral philosophies. This project involves the development of the potential of those cultures and philosophies that have been ignored, upon the basis of their own resources, in constructive dialogue with European and North American Modernity. It is in this way that Arab philosophy, for example, could incorporate the hermeneutics of European philosophy, develop and apply them in order to discover new interpretations of the Korán that would make possible a new, much-needed Arab political philosophy, or Arab feminism. It will be the fruit of the Arab philosophical tradition, updated through inter-philosophical dialogue (not only with Europe, but equally with Latin America, India, China, etc.), oriented towards a pluriversal future global philosophy. This project is necessarily trans-modern, and thus also trans-capitalist.44

In these words Dussel exposes the other as the spring for a new philosophical dialogue, worldwide and beyond Western hegemonic determination. Moreover, it is from radical exteriority that such thinking opens up. But in what sense may one understand the sense of exteriority that underlies this eruptive disclosure?

Concrete Exteriority through Dependency Theory The exteriority of the other takes its concrete formulation in Dussel in association with world-system theory. This is a term from a theory developed by the Argentine economist Raúl Prebisch and by the American Jewish sociologist Immanuel Wallerstein.45 This theory is in part a reworking of Marxism, and as such it recognizes structures of exploitation that underlie capitalism. It arises in part also from Lenin’s writings on the international character of capitalism. As Wallerstein and the theory show, capitalism does not support itself by virtue of the exploitation of workers and the production of capital in their own national contexts. In the modern world, the imperial and capitalist powers sustain a living standard for all within their economic system by exploiting the labor of those beyond their national frontiers. Taken in the form of a world system, this means that the world is split between those who profit by living within the capitalist system and those who work for it but are systematically excluded because they remain outside it. At the same time, this exposure of capitalism as a world system allows for a full recognition of Lenin’s idea of dependency between imperial powers and other nations, since the nations outside the central capitalist system are dependent on that central power. Hence, as Dussel puts it, we encounter an economy of “domination and exploitation.”46 The theory ultimately recognizes not only a system of domination but also one of dependency. The same theory is behind Salazar Bondy’s critique of the situation of Latin America with respect to the question of its having a philosophy. As Walter Mignolo has clearly explained, Dussel’s thought goes beyond worldsystem theory.47 Wallerstein’s theory is oriented by the presupposition of the unfolding of a modern capitalist system that precedes coloniality, and the theory

64 | Identity, Dependency, and the Project of Liberation therefore analyzes Western modernity from the point of view and with the epistemic prejudices of Western modernity in its self-identification as the origin and courier of all history and humanity. Dussel, instead, recognizes that the exteriority of the center is not other than the difference intrinsic to modernity, an exteriority created by the colonialist system that accompanies and is inseparable from Western modernity.48 Thus in Dussel’s case one finds the recognition of an inside economy. Its exteriority makes recognizable the other and has a concrete reality with effective, active, and creative presence.49 From the actual experience of existing in sheer exteriority and the creativity that this may mean beyond the system, in the recognition of the concrete life of exteriority, we find a glimpse of a living force. In this moment not only does the other appear in order to challenge the totality but also an ontological displacement occurs: The appearing of the other marks a movement—a moment when exterior peripheral life rises forth in its potential creativity, in a moment that is not individual but of a people, of a community, and in its creative force. In his philosophy of liberation, Dussel develops this moment in terms of the poietic (in the sense of creating and human mediation), the economic, the political, and the erotic.50

A Thought Fed by Life Exteriority as Life: Dussel’s New Interpretation of Marx Dussel finds the source of the creativity of being in radical exteriority in the fact of human life. As he states in his famous debates with Vattimo: “Against Gianni Vattimo, who affirms: ‘There are no facts, only interpretations!’ I replied to him in Bogotá: ‘There are facts, which are always interpreted!’”51 These facts are the concrete living experiences of the excluded and oppressed. It is life before the discourse that puts philosophy into question and calls for ethical thought. This is the epiphany that grounds the Philosophy of Liberation for Dussel.52 At the same time, to speak of radical exteriority is not to abandon reason.53 On the contrary, there is logic to domination as well as to liberation. Dussel finds the logic of exteriority by reading Marx anew in his works through the eighties: La producción teorética de Marx. Un comentario a los Grundrisse (The Theoretical Production of Marx: A Commentary on the Grundrisse), 1985;54 Hacia un Marx desconocido. Un comentario a los manuscritos del 61–63 (Towards an Unknown Marx: A Commentary on the 61–63 Manuscripts), 1988;55 and El último Marx (1863–1882) (The Last Marx [1863–1882]), 1990.56 These works culminate in Las metáforas teológicas de Marx (Marx’s Theological Metaphors) in 1994.57 For Hegel, or for the Hegelian reading of Marx, capital has its value out of a dialectic totality and toward the establishing of a totality ultimately controlled by the product or surplus value. The moving principle of capital is the work of the worker taken into the thin air of surplus value through the alienation of labor. For

Latin American Philosophy and Liberation | 65 Dussel, the value of capital arises from a sheer living pulsation that is not the work of the worker but the being of the worker as “living work.” In other words, the origin of value is not work or capital, but the nothing before and after life has become work. In Política de la liberación. Historia mundial y critica (Politics of Liberation: World History and Critique), Dussel writes: “Only out of the positive sense of living work (which includes the corporeality and dignity of the living person) may we now understand the sense of the first negation, as condition for the possibility of capital.”58 In other words, before the capital system and the totality of being there is the concrete living body, the bare life from which a critique of all systems may set out—if this life is heard and articulated. To say it in terms of Dussel’s Theological Metaphors of Marx, capital requires a sacrifice, and the living body is sacrificed to the fetish, the false image that is the value of capitalism. In both of Enrique Dussel’s major works (the Ethics of Liberation59 and the Politics of Liberation)60 concrete life appears as the universal material principle that calls for and grounds all politics and ethics of liberation.61 In general, life is to be understood as a pulsation and will to live. This potency is the source and end purpose by which one understands ethical as well as political power. Therefore, life is the point from which philosophy of liberation may reinterpret ethics and political power.62 An overview of Dussel’s Politics of Liberation and of how this sense of life is presented in the second volume of the Politics (subtitled “Architectonic”) may be helpful as we introduce how he sees this primacy and potency of life.

Life and the Politics of Liberation The fundamental question of the Politics of Liberation is the question of how we may find ways to develop governments from below, out of the experiences of the excluded, the oppressed, and exploited. Here liberation does not mean only a negative critique that points out the structures of domination and dismantles them. Liberation requires knowing how to govern once the negative critique has put the system into question. In order to overcome a system one must be able to pose workable, practical alternatives. This is a point that Dussel makes emphatically concerning the occupy movements in 2011 in his “Carta a los indignados”: Indignation is necessary but it must immediately be practiced democratically. . . . Participation without organization, without institutionalization is spontaneism. A purely spontaneous movement . . . of great numbers like in Seattle, Barcelona or Cancún, without previous organization, . . . without establishing continuity in time, in the daily survival of networks for days, weeks, months, years, will dissolve within a short time. . . . Next, it is necessary to organize. This will be the great revolutionary step of the 21st Century. Spontaneous movement is not enough. . . . Political participation in the empirical political spheres is necessary.63

Dussel’s Politics develop the framework for such participatory representation.

66 | Identity, Dependency, and the Project of Liberation The Politics is divided in three volumes. The first part, titled Politics of Liberation: A Critical World History (Política de liberación: historia mundial y crítica)64 discusses the history of political thought in a subversive or transformative manner by resituating that history beyond the Western ancient/modern tradition. The second volume, Política de la liberación: arquitectónica (Politics of Liberation: Architectonics), takes up the task of identifying and articulating the minimal principles required for organizing and developing a political thought from below and for this reason is called ontological.65 The third volume has not been published, but it should serve as a destructive critique of the previous ontological structures. The destruction occurs as the principles and fields of action outlined in the abstract meet directly with concrete, living situations. Each of the three volumes deals with a transformative moment toward the construction of new political categories and systems. In this section and for the sake of our present discussion I focus on the second volume, looking toward the third. As I have just mentioned, the second volume, subtitled “Architectonics,” seeks to give a transformative analysis of current political thought, or the ontological structures of political philosophy, through the reinterpretation of political action and institutions. This reinterpretation is guided by the exposition of three fundamental principles that have remained to this point implicitly at play in modern political thought. The three principles central to the work are the material principle (which attends to the concrete lives of the excluded, oppressed, and exploited); the formal principle (which concerns the practical aspect of power, i.e., the legitimatization of the power of the people [pueblo] through concrete, rational, and normative procedures carried out through the development of institutions); and the principle of feasibility (the limits, real and material, that mark what may be done and the development of new means). This last principle entails recognizing the possibilities of a project according to the empirical situation and fitting all actions to the parameters of specific human lives.66 Dussel’s principles are oriented by a single pivotal shift in the understanding of political experience as such; namely, through a reformulation of the concept of political power.

Potentia and Potestas: A Reinterpretation of Political Power in Light of Life Traditionally political power occurs as a division between potentia (the living community in its material willfulness) and potestas (the representing individual or group).67 The origin of political power is seen as a matter of the transference of power (potentia) from the will of the community to an individual or group (potestas). This transference is the moment when the potestas becomes the single and sovereign site of political power. This means that the sovereign becomes the origin of law and order, the source of power that rules over the community and transforms it into civil society.68 As Dussel sees it, this traditional view misses the

Latin American Philosophy and Liberation | 67 fundamental point about political power. All political power arises from below, from those who are governed, from the system’s periphery. In order to see this clearly one must rethink the role of the potestas.69 The power of the community precedes the governing of the potestas.70 Thus, the role of the governing potestas, if it is to keep its political power and validity, is not to “rule over,” to exercise “its” power over the community, but rather to serve by obeying the community. Against a fetishist view of the potestas as self-referential and autonomous, Dussel’s thought offers the relocation of political power to its origin, to the community. Given the dependence of the potestas on the power of the community, this is not an idealistic argument but a practical one: The moment the system at work becomes oppressive and exploitative, the government begins to lose power, until a change or total collapse occurs. This shift may be phrased in a different manner by saying that the community becomes a people once it becomes conscious of its power.71 At this point one encounters a direct transformation of the ideas of how citizenship and institutions work. The community and individuals must become political actors because they must participate in order for political power to function. This is why above, in his “Carta a los indignados,” Dussel insists that empirical political participation must follow spontaneous action. Then institutions are formed out of the consensus of the community and with a view to guaranteeing that the participation of the community not be severed from the governing body. Under this model, institutions make up the political system, and the system is always a matter of a representation subject to the participation of the community and its individuals. The three principles that will underlie this political configuration are those that have always implicitly ordered politics, namely, the material, the formal, and the question of feasibility. The three principles are co-constitutive and interdependent. As we saw at the beginning of this discussion, according to the general three-volume plan of the Politics of Liberation, this minimal sketch will have to be put to the test and fully articulated out of the concrete living experiences of the people (pueblo). This will occupy the third volume of the Politics, the critical volume.

Life The transformation in the understanding of political power and the political principles that arise from it occur out of a single fundamental element in Dussel’s thought, namely, life. Life’s living, pulsating will is the source of political power. Indeed, the Architectonic is introduced by a detailed discussion of the will to live in Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Heidegger.72 In the book’s third and last chapter Dussel makes clear that it is life that ultimately orients the politics of liberation. Close to the conclusion he writes: “Life is the absolute condition, furthermore: it is the content of politics; and because of this it is equally its ultimate objective, the objective of its ends, strategies, tactics, means, structures, and institutions.”73 Po-

68 | Identity, Dependency, and the Project of Liberation litical thought and praxis have as their task “to produce, reproduce, and develop human life in the community, publicly, and ultimately in the long run in all humanity. That is to say, keeping human life as criterion.”74 We are speaking here of a politics guided by life as a dynamic occurrence, as the desire to live, as a will anterior to all will to power in terms of domination.75 Each moment of the political task refers to one of these dimensions of affirming human life. At the level of production we are speaking of a material principle, the concrete life of each human being as manifested in his or her material and practical production as a biological and mental being. At the formal level, this life is reproduced and continued through institutions and cultural values. These institutions and cultural structures require in turn a critical process of development responding and corresponding to the concrete needs of peoples (pueblos) and subjects. At this point in his discussion of the ontology of the will to live, Dussel makes the crucial differentiation that will reorient the sense of political power in terms of the role of potestas. The will to live figures a will that opens a time-space for all that is desired, and this occurs through a projection or will to put forth, to do something in relation to all that is desired (poder-poner).76 Such putting forth may occur in two ways: The positive form occurs as a mediation that responds to the need to produce, reproduce, and augment life. In its negative sense this will occurs as a putting-something-over-others, as domination over others’ very pulsating will to live.77 In the latter case we recognize the origin of political fetishistic power in the form of a sovereign power over and above the people (pueblo). In the first case we feel the pulsation of life that is the originary spring of political power.78 In short, true political power may only occur in obedience to the originary, pulsating, and willing living force and its requirements.

Proximity in Radical Exteriority as Aesthetic Sensibility: The Fundamental Disposition that Orients the Project of the Philosophy of Liberation and the Lack of an Aesthetics of Liberation Living Proximity and Radical Exteriority: Another Point of Departure beyond the Central Culture of Domination The exposure to radical exteriority requires a particular sensibility. As Dussel explains in the section of his Philosophy of Liberation titled “From Phenomenology to Liberation,” we must move away from thinking of the world in terms of the relationship of man to nature—in terms of a world made up of conquerors and that which stands for the conquering ego cogitans to see, comprehend, and manipulate. Instead, he offers other beginnings for our thought, namely, the spatiality of proximity and distance, the politics of dominator and dominated, and the position of human to human.79 These relationships occur out of a proximity that precedes the world split between man and nature, a proximity that figures a dis-

Latin American Philosophy and Liberation | 69 tinct archaic act that exposes us to radical exteriority behind our claims to identity. In a beautiful passage Dussel writes, It is a matter, then, of beginning with somebody who is encountered beyond the world of ontology or Being, anterior to the world and its horizon. From proximity—beyond physical closeness, anterior to the truth of Being—we come to the light of day when we appear, when our mother gives us birth. To give birth (maternal act) is to appear (filial act).80

This proximity is not the same as the crossing of distances in the tradition between rational subject (ego cogitans) and objects, be they natural, made, or other rational animals.81 At the same time there is nothing obscure or mystical in proximity. Rather, proximity recalls for us in concrete terms our most proximate human experiences, which, perhaps because they are so proximate, are always in danger of being forgotten. In the proximity of mother and child, in the touch of lovers, and in the shoulder-to-shoulder struggle of those who fight for justice, we find a basic beginning for being in the world in a way that no longer puts the world in front of us at our disposal and us at an arm’s length from our sense of existence with others.82 This turn to proximity figures our return to arche, or beginning, in the sense of a return to what does not belong to us and will unequivocally remain other to us. Dussel draws this insight from Levinas, when he returns to the way self and its relationship to a world or horizon occur in the unexpected encounter with the human other.83 It is not that I am by virtue of what belongs or may ever fully belong to me; rather, the other, an unfathomable exteriority, situates me. Dussel writes, “To approach injustice is always a risk because it is to shorten the distance towards a distinct freedom [una libertad distinta].”84 Justice, like all our relationships and senses of existence (from arche or beginning through to the eschatological moment or the end), happens out of a fundamental human proximity in distinctness, that is, as we approach the other and as we sustain our relationships in the consciousness of the other’s distinctness; hence, the danger of rejection grounds justice. Mother, lover, brother, friend, animal, and earth but also work of art and culture are found in light of concrete relations of proximity sustained by profound exteriority. Given that human relations are sustained by alterity in the sense of radical exteriority, every relationship we might sustain will be fundamentally ethical. It is for this reason that philosophy of liberation is always a matter of ethical and political thought. As Dussel shows, this sense of otherness is not abstract but arises in concrete experience. The proximity of mother and child occurs always in a cultural context, and the child finds the other in the community before becoming an individual subject in need of “social contracts.” We must be careful not to confuse proximity with the subjective inner life of a consciousness that under capitalism or a culture of oppression sees itself always already and by na-

70 | Identity, Dependency, and the Project of Liberation ture as an isolated, rational, and desirous subject. Furthermore, it is because of their concrete life in radical exteriority that the dispossessed and the oppressed in their peripheral histories and culture figure precisely a path toward thinking from a radical exteriority that cannot be conquered. Thus, philosophy of liberation is of the people of the periphery because it arises in that space of exteriority, and it is that exteriority that sustains its thought and marks our basic departure from the culture of domination. To say it inversely and in a way that must alert us to the way the culture of domination is sustained throughout the world: The perpetual cultural invasion of the periphery by means of the voluminous influx of popular and technological information from the center, including the many academic discourses that explain and seek “the other” at a distance, operates as a mechanism of forgetting proximity and radical exteriority. By contrast to the empty chatter from the center, in philosophy of liberation our conscious undergoing of exclusion and of living in radical exteriority—sustained by the sensibility of the proximate—offer a firm place for articulating authentic thought, not because we may copy the Western spirit or its creative drive but because we can see the world arising to configurations of meaning out of the exquisite edge of an existence always exposed to sheer, indomitable exteriority. This dwelling in our exposure to exteriority, this sensibility in a thought grounded in an exteriority found in human proximity, and the recovery of our living culture through a conceptual sensibility informed directly by such experiences, these I take to be the basic elements for developing an articulate sense of being Latin American and for developing a Latin American situated thought.

The Missing Aesthetic Dimension in the Philosophy of Liberation The sense of proximity in radical exteriority is the grounding for the transformations sought by the philosophy of liberation; from it arises the transformation of the concept of potestas and the transfiguration of a community into a people. The desire to live is communal and affords a group the possibility of becoming a people in turning toward liberation only in light of a distinct sense of proximate exteriority. But this proximity, which as we saw earlier is the very inceptive encounter in justice, is never guaranteed. Indeed, as Salazar Bondy already indicates, for those who have been colonized, for those born and living under the oppression, exclusion, and destruction exercised by the colonizing systems of power and knowledge, this sensibility is always under attack when not forgotten or neglected. This is what Frantz Fanon shows in his analysis of colonialism in Black Skins White Masks, for example. Under the pathology of colonialism the dominated identifies with the dominator. Fanon concludes: “The black wants to be white.” 85 And, if Fanon’s struggle exemplifies the desire to live, this is in spite of the dominated consciousness, in spite of a community that cannot make the turn that recognizes its exclusion and devastation as more than a natural fact of its

Latin American Philosophy and Liberation | 71 existence. Furthermore, as Fanon points out, the objectification of the person of color is a matter of bodily configurations. He speaks, in fact, of an “epidermic experience.” 86 This means that the situation of the dominated is often such that in having been corporeally habituated to recognize themselves as secondary or insignificant—as expendable life, as entities available for use—the colonized have lost the kind of sensibility that allows them to see themselves through the encounter of human with human. What has been lost is the very possibility of setting toward identity out of the sense of proximity in irreparable exteriority, in light of which one engages one’s distinctness and freedom. From this reduction of one’s sense of existence and possibility follows a critical implication for the philosophy of liberation: The colonized consciousness often has lost the sense of being in the proximate exteriority from which something like community and the political turn Dussel is calling for may happen. It is not only that the oppressor considers the peripheral lives nothing; the issue is that those in the periphery identify with themselves through the erasure of their existence. This happens through the abandonment of their lives’ potency and dignity. The material marks of degradation and dismissal of life, such as extreme hunger and suffering, are often mitigated by minimal survival conditions, precisely in a way that will make the dominated fearful and docile. One may think, for example, of Serra Pelada in Brazil, a place that became hell on earth for thousands who had nothing and sought life in becoming enslaved in the Brazilian gold mines.87 At this point the concrete and existential embodied experience of the oppressed, excluded, and exploited marks an aporetic moment for the political transformation sought by Dussel and the philosophy of liberation. To put the problem in Foucault’s and Giorgio Agamben’s terms: normalized bodies severed from the sensibility out of which they may recognize themselves in their distinct lives will not revel, because their pulsating will to live has been replaced with a docile consciousness called “life.” Furthermore, with time the refining of bodies at the service of the system becomes more exquisite and leaves no room for other senses of life. When colonizing power takes over life, living desire becomes the function of the production and preservation of power within the system.88 But here the issue is not only normative power relations and their embodiment. As we will see now, and as already indicated by the issue of proximity in radical exteriority, there is a lived aesthetic dimension fundamentally at play in the executions and determinations of power as well as in their possible undoing. Given Dussel’s emphasis on life as the source of the politics and ethics of liberation and the primary importance of the sensibility or sense of being in proximate exteriority which informs every configuration of senses of existence and humanity, sensibility appears as the limit of politics in terms of rational and formal action. In other words, dependency and liberation turn on sensibility, on an aesthetic level of experience that must be thought. It is an aesthetic sense of exis-

72 | Identity, Dependency, and the Project of Liberation tence in radical exteriority that informs and touches all normative and conceptual determinations in their direction and sense: It is here that aesthetic experience appears as a basic and necessary element for the politics and ethics of liberation. The life-sensibility upon which philosophy of liberation is founded and finds its transformative possibility is a life in the flesh, in corporeal, existential, and affective dispositions situated at the limit of fact and reason. The sense of proximity in radical exteriority, and even the fact that such proximity always occurs in a communal context, tell us that institutions and the gathering of communities into a people’s political consciousness depend on other levels of experience in life. It is out of and in light of these other pre-conceptual levels that the potency of arguments may be found and given form. Without articulate sensibility and the opening in and with radical exteriority in concrete and ephemeral experiences, a politics of liberation cannot occur. Here, aesthetic experience, the dispositions and sensibilities that inform and direct the development of rational arguments, the construction of institutions, and the calculation of feasibility— this aesthetic experience appears as a turning point, a definitive field of struggle on which the politics of liberation depend. Recovering and constantly struggling for the dispositions and sensibilities of being in proximate exteriority, of living with life’s distinctness, are the basis for developing political identities in terms of individuals and members of a people (pueblo). Here we have turned from “life” as a given or category to the question of life understood at the level of aesthetic sensibility, in a radical sense of aesthetics. This addition to the philosophy of liberation must be articulated further at this point. By aesthetics I mean the experience of liberation and configuration of consciousness in the undergoing of bodily life, a development of living consciousness not yet discursive or institutional. Here I understand aesthetics in a sense much broader than the traditional study of aesthetic judgment or the nature of beauty. Aesthesis here concerns the liberation and configuration of consciousness in the concrete and ephemeral passing of life in its corporeal mental-affective occurrences. It is at this level that alterity in the sense of proximate radical exteriority happens. This is a level of understanding not yet determined by conceptual knowledge, that is, rationality, conceptual structures, or the construction of institutions. At the same time this is not the abandoning of life to irrationality but a call to attend to the fact that life sensed by mindful living proximity, heart-mind is the ground and time-space of attunement or disposition for conceptual knowledge and for the configuration of normative institutions. Indeed, this is the level of sensibility and understanding one finds articulated in painting, music, poetry, popular art, rituals, oral traditions, etc. And yet, this very field of sensibility has always been under attack through the unfolding of Western modern instrumental rationalism and its colonization of power and knowledge. At this delicate level of aesthetic understanding and oppression, the colonizing mechanisms and struc-

Latin American Philosophy and Liberation | 73 tures (the system of oppression and dismissal of life) operate in various ways, effectively removing, severing, aesthetic experience from the question of the colonialization of power and knowledge and one’s existential projectional horizon concerning the possibilities of senses of being. One finds this operation in the identification of art with “the beautiful” and its theories (erasing the vital transformative character of life’s radical exteriority and its unfathomable proximity, which informs the very origination of works of art, and situating the works within materialist history and/or a transcendental realm only accessible to Western rationality). One may also consider the inverse, the romanticist equating of art with the irrational, and thereby the severing of life from art and vice versa. One finds this separation as well in the common belief that art belongs in museums (place in which art is never created) instead of leading us to see art in the living manifestation of distinct peoples.89 It has been the naiveté of Marxist materialism to believe that art is a matter of markets, history, and institutions, thus handing over to market value decisive power over the corporeal sense of life, its pre-conceptual dispositions, and, with this, abandoning the source for the possible unfolding of liberating consciousness. Finally, we have come to think of bodily experience as removed from mind—and therefore secondary to the material sensibilities that inform a politics of liberation—in short, as apolitical.90 As a result we have lost the possibility of seeing aesthetic experience as the liberating expression of consciousness and as the perpetual challenge to operative orderings of life under structures of power such as the one figured by the coloniality of power and knowledge. Today we find ourselves isolated in our bodies, wonderers under the dazzling lights of the markets, like entities feeding on empty desires and dreams. We fail to recognize our aesthetic experiences as the time-space that must be constantly recovered for the sake of the expression, transformation, and opening to the potentiality of our communities. Such transformative movement can occur through an aesthetic sensibility from which a people’s consciousness toward dignity and equality may arise. This aesthetic sensibility, this sense of being in proximate exteriority, must be an essential, active part of a philosophy of liberation that makes its claim out of lived experience. In short, this is what the philosophy of liberation has yet to engage, and it is what the present work wants to introduce as a fundamental dimension of liberatory thinking.

Toward an Aesthetic Thinking from Radical Exteriority Dussel’s thought exposes the radical character of Latin American experience and thought with respect to Western philosophy by situating Latin American thought geopolitically and existentially. Latin American philosophy of liberation arises from the periphery to challenge the center. It does so by critically engaging the colonized consciousness of the periphery as well as the global structures of power that sustain the relationship of domination and dependency. This is the geopoliti-

74 | Identity, Dependency, and the Project of Liberation cal sense of radical exteriority. As we have seen, one also finds this exteriority at an existential or phenomenological level, as the human is itself distinguished by a being with others through a relationship that does not belong to an individual, a mindset, or a culture alone and that therefore cannot be controlled by a way of comprehending existence. It is the other, the peripheral, that situates me, that affords the possibility of the determination of the thinking “I” and its particular rationalism. Therefore being oneself as well as being with others becomes not a matter of domination but of openness in radical proximity. At the same time, being proximate requires giving up the pretense or claim to control and power over other beings. Moreover, this openness is not a matter of rational decision but the way life opens for humans—and, I would add, also for other living beings. As we have just seen, this is ultimately a matter inseparable from aesthetic concrete living or embodied experiences. The question, then, of a situated Latin American thought has now become a question of thinking from radical exteriority and in light of this sensibility. I have identified this sense of sensibility that underlies Dussel’s thought as a moment that calls to our attention an aesthetic level of life and consciousness, a level of experience and thought that is inseparable from being in radical exteriority, precisely because it is this sensibility that orients Dussel’s project. As a result, thinking out of this sensibility and in light of it becomes an issue for the philosophy of liberation and for any philosophy that intends to challenge, destruct, and overcome domination and dependency as found under modern Western conditions, which have been exposed by Salazar Bondy, Zea, Dussel, and the philosophers of liberation. I take this awareness of a sensibility concerned with radical exteriority to be an addition to Dussel’s project as well as to other philosophies that seek to think beyond colonization and beyond the Western hegemonic systems of power, knowledge, and dependency. I also take this attentiveness to being in radical exteriority to intensify and complicate how one may understand a thinking beyond such systems and structures of power and knowledge, namely by raising the question of the extent to which philosophical thought as identified with rational calculative thinking and production may engage such levels and senses of distinct and singular embodied existence. Thinking in light of this sensibility and out of one’s radical exteriority is distinct from modern Western colonizing thought and the systems of power and knowledge that sustain it. As I show in the coming chapters, the issue is to think in departure from Western modern instrumental rationalism and its logic of production. I am speaking of the very sense of the rational in relationship to concrete life. The exposure to the sense of radical exteriority and living experience beyond modern instrumental rationalism and its normative determinations of all existence opens a path for questioning and thinking I develop throughout the rest of the book. I take this to be a fundamental and necessary part of opening paths for new spaces in world philosophies. The rest of this book develops from these ques-

Latin American Philosophy and Liberation | 75 tions by engaging some contemporary Latin American thinkers and the ways they take up the task of thinking from their distinct situations. Before moving on directly to such discussions, in the next chapter I turn again to Dussel, and this time to some of his harshest critics, in order to show the limits of his historical and rational-dialectical approach with respect to his own insight concerning radical exteriority. Through this examination, the question of the limits of modern rationalist instrumental thought with respect to a thinking from outside the modern Western colonizing tradition will become more distinct. This will lead to the discussion in chapter 5 of the coloniality of power and knowledge and the sense of history and temporality that, as a sensibility and disposition, underlies and perpetuates Western modern rationalism in its pernicious colonizing forms.

4

Delimitations . . . of Dussel’s Philosophy of Liberation and Beyond

Hay que tomar una postura crítica que nos ayude a hacer una transformación con lo que tenemos. We must take a critical position that will help us to bring forth a transformation with what we have. —Enrique Dussel, 2009

Throughout our discussions so far one pressing issue becomes evident as the driving concern behind Latin American thought: the concern with engaging concrete, living Latin American existence. As Dussel points out, it is ultimately life that calls for thought’s liberation. In this chapter I discuss some of the main critiques of Dussel’s thought, all of which are driven by this same concern. As we will see, these critical approaches will raise the question of how to engage the concrete and diverse singularities that compose the general fields Dussel has strategically outlined. What is put in question is the way thought situates itself and the kinds of thinking that are involved in the attempt to engage Latin America’s distinct existence. In her book Cultural Identity and Social Liberation in Latin American Thought, Ofelia Schutte criticizes Dussel’s thinking for failing to engage the singularity implied in the radical exteriority of his philosophy of liberation.1 As Schutte sees it, in Dussel’s work singularity becomes a general concept and a matter of conceptual rather than engaged comprehension. Her critique follows an earlier criticism raised by Horacio Cerutti Guldberg in 1977 (the same year as the publication of Dussel’s Philosophy of Liberation) in his book Filosofía de la liberación latinoamericana (Philosophy of Latin American Liberation).2 For Cerutti Guldberg, Dussel’s discourse arises in a populist tone that risks repeating the totalitarian history that accompanies the colonialism and dependency sustained in Latin America, and it does so by remaining wedded to a general and ultimately unquestioning way of thinking the question of liberation. In this chapter I begin by discussing both critiques in order to open some questions that will lead us to ask more substantially about the extent to which Dussel’s own thinking engages the radical exteriority to which he exposes philosophy in his Philosophy of Liberation in 1977. As we will see, both Cerutti Guldberg and

76

Delimitations . . . of Dussel’s Philosophy | 77 Schutte point to a fundamental ambiguity in Dussel’s thought: On the one hand, Dussel begins from the phenomenological experience of radical exteriority before rational discourse. If one follows Dussel’s original insight in his Philosophy of Liberation, then analectical thinking should occur not only from other places (the geopolitical point) but in ways that no longer repeat Western modern rational justifications, concepts, and ways of comprehending the other, at least by putting these ways of thinking into question.3 On the other hand, however, Dussel’s thought ultimately takes the form of traditional rational arguments, seeking to speak the language of the center for the sake of gaining recognition for the excluded and the oppressed. This is a complicated issue, since it involves Dussel’s understanding of rationality in a manner broader than the modern Western tradition but requires as well that one clarify the way Dussel’s own thinking situates him with respect to the knowledge and forms of lives of the excluded. It is neither Dussel’s momentous insight nor his intention that is in question but his turn from phenomenology and its later forms in deconstruction to a logical and pragmatic approach to the question of radical exteriority. Thus, rather than questioning Dussel’s philosophical accomplishment, that is, his opening of a previously unthought space for a philosophy from below, the following discussion wants to mark the delimitation of Dussel’s thought and thereby the path toward taking his insight further.4 At the same time, this discussion opens the question of how to understand rationality and philosophical thought in ways that go beyond Westernizing instrumental rationalism. Behind this last issue is the question of the extent to which Dussel is limited in his possible engagement of the aesthetic dimension of liberation. The broader sense of rationality and of philosophy beyond its rationalist constraints, and the path toward aesthetics of liberation, are developed in diverse ways in part 3 of this book, where various distinct manners of thinking in radical exteriority are articulated.

Ofelia Schutte’s and Horacio Cerutti Guldberg’s Criticism For Ofelia Schutte, Dussel’s thought fails to engage the singularity of difference that constitutes Latin American reality. Schutte’s own work arises from a sense of thinking as active engagement with distinct socio-political situations and races and particularly in terms of feminism.5 As Schutte sees it, Dussel thinks in terms of a center and a periphery, and those in the periphery—the excluded, exploited, and silenced—do not appear distinctly but are represented as an undifferentiated whole seen from above rather than thought from below. As Ofelia Schutte and Santiago Castro-Gómez have observed, this self-image works on the basis of a Manichean economy of good and evil, in which the Western center is evil while the exteriority of the center is the utopian possibility for liberation. This Manichean view divides existence into two absolute realms and in doing so fails the singularity that it seeks to liberate. Setting the imperialist center against the al-

78 | Identity, Dependency, and the Project of Liberation terity of exteriority creates two totalities, in spite of Dussel’s continuous appeal to the distinctness that configures exteriority. Schutte writes, “Thus ‘alterity’ ceases to refer to an otherness or a difference thought to lie ‘beyond absolute knowledge,’ as interpreted by post-modern writers. . . . Instead alterity . . . comes to designate the group of a new absolute, but one constructed in the name of the poor, the exploited, and the oppressed.” 6 I believe Schutte is correct in pointing out Dussel’s failure to remain with the distinctness or alterity in the sense of radical exteriority. However, as we saw in the previous discussion of his work, Dussel is clear that the division is a strategic one and that the ultimate configuration of political and ethical principles will come from the distinct lives of peoples and communities. Indeed, as we also saw, Dussel uses the term “distinto” (“distinct”) rather than “different” in his discourse in order to draw a critical differentiation between, on the one hand, the different that remains wedded to a sameness in order to be different, as is the case in colonizing thought, and, on the other hand, a distinctness that may be recognized for itself.7 Moreover, the issue for Schutte with Dussel’s discourse of exteriority is the exclusion of individual agency in the name of the movement of exteriority as a whole.8 But we saw as well how for Dussel exteriority is constituted by a fundamental difference that at the same time arises in an historical and communal situation. Thus, the individual arises from a profound sense of exteriority that does not preclude the separation between being part of a community and finding one’s distinct agency. Schutte’s critique remains crucial for the reinterpretation of Dussel’s philosophy of liberation by later Latin American thinkers in at least one sense, namely, the extent in which his strategic image of a divided world and his messianic sense of philosophy will engage the concrete distinctness of people’s lives. As Schutte points out, “The process of appealing to the logic of exteriority can easily constitute an evasion when it comes to analyzing the actual social relations of domination and the corresponding struggles for freedom found in human existence.” 9 The issue goes back to Cerutti Guldberg’s concern with the self-enclosing of the philosophy of liberation, a self-image that severs it from living praxis while creating an image of the people that situates it as the new center for philosophical thought. Before moving on to Dussel’s engagement with radical exteriority and from that very situation, I must mention at least one central issue raised by Horacio Cerutti Guldberg.

k As Cerutti Guldberg explains in his Filosofía de la liberación latinoamericana (Philosophy of Latin American Liberation), a distinctive characteristic of the movement of philosophy of liberation in general is that it is a “salvationist” (salvacionista) philosophy due to its compromise with the social and political situation in Argentina, Latin America, and the world (particularly on the issues of

Delimitations . . . of Dussel’s Philosophy | 79 domination, dependency, and colonialism).10 In this sense the philosophy of liberation is a populist movement.11 In his analysis Cerutti Guldberg focuses on the specific self-images (auto-imágenes) by which some of the main thinkers of the movement understand what philosophy of liberation is.12 One form of ontological salvationism concerns an ethicist position.13 This is the position occupied by Dussel’s thought according to Cerutti Guldberg. Summing up his analysis, the author writes: Philosophy, just as found in this subgroup, is an activity specific to the philosopher, [who is] the only one open to the call of the other; he is, however not open to the interpolation of the social sciences or humanities, but rather dictates to them their epistemic limits and possibilities. . . . First philosophy serves a theology that responds to an unconditional alterity. The counter-image of this philosophy is north-Atlantic dominating philosophy and its dominating subject. The subject is not put into question, and the ethical philosopher appears in his proper real life as the norm through which alterity and justice may be arrived at. The self-image of this philosophy is not far from traditional philosophy, indeed, the theoretical places identify themselves fully with those it [Dussel’s philosophy of liberation] assigns and recognizes for the philosophical and scientific disciplines. The change is that instead of first engaging in metaphysics as first philosophy, this function is assigned to the ethical-political. And although this may seem so, it is not an alternative to the dominating dimension over philosophy. This philosophy of the populist philosophers lacks its liberating from itself, before being ‘liberation.’ 14

For Cerutti Guldberg this position of the philosopher, this way of understanding the sense of a philosophy of liberation, ultimately is not different from the traditional placement of philosophy in the Western tradition. The excluded totality is exposed through the insight and word of the philosopher, whose reasoning and place of elocution remain unquestioned with respect to their ultimate form and task. The theoretical places of thought have not changed, even if the object of inquiry has now become the other rather than the dominant subject; even if the roles of the actors change, the thinking that situates them does not give up its determining place and character. This is not to deny Dussel’s great contribution to world philosophies through the recognition of the very possibility of thinking from radical exteriority as well as his recovery of history and his call for the articulation of distinct knowledges. The point here is to mark the limits of that opening without dismissing the insights. Indeed, I would say that if Cerutti Guldberg’s criticism seems effective, it is because of the challenge the philosophy of liberation and Dussel’s work present to world philosophies: How does a thinking from below arise without remaining determined by the systems of power and knowledge that have organized philosophical discourses throughout modernity? But, going back to the main question of the limitation of the philosophy of liberation, Cerutti Guldberg’s analysis shows that in its disposition and self-image, in spite of its conceptual developments and arguments for radical exteriority, the

80 | Identity, Dependency, and the Project of Liberation philosophy of liberation does not overcome the way of thinking and therefore the movement and configuration of power that sustain Western thought. This is why Cerutti Guldberg concludes that the kind of philosophy followed and developed by the ethicist position must overcome its own form of thinking before claiming to speak as a form of liberation.15 The most direct response to Cerutti Guldberg’s critique of Dussel comes from the latter’s four volumes on Marx as well as from his Politics and Ethics of Liberation, in which Dussel thinks through the meaning and sense of a people and the ways of engaging philosophy in the configuration of social-political and ethical structures.16 As Dussel concludes, philosophy of liberation begins with life and refers at each step of development to the distinct concreteness of life. As we saw, this insight underlies his Ethics of Liberation as well as the Politics of Liberation. In both cases the role of the leader, philosopher, or political leader is not to rule but to serve. In our previous chapter we concluded by uncovering a sense of exposure that thought must have as it occurs out of an acute sense of radical exteriority. Ultimately Dussel’s thought concerns listening to the other, learning from them, and articulating their experience and needs. One may say that this supposes a particular kind of insight on the part of the philosopher, but this is not the insight of a messianic figure that will deliver truth. Rather, we are speaking of a thinking that requires the kind of aesthetic sensibility in being exposed in proximate exteriority we discussed in closing the previous chapter. Moreover, thinking in such radical exteriority does not necessarily mean holding something religious or mysterious over the rational. Indeed, the issue is precisely a way of thinking that engages what has been deemed mysterious and irrational by Western instrumental rationalism. If one stays with Dussel’s phenomenological insight from 1977, then rationality must be put in question in terms of the form that it takes in the modern Western instrumental project and in terms of its application to dominant patterns over other peoples and lives. Rationality must be rethought out of distinct living experiences. Liberation is a matter of exteriority in the sense of a sensibility that resituates rational thought without abandoning it. Moreover, this sensibility does not exclude singularity but rather emphasizes the distinctness in the very thought that it unfolds. This is not a populist approach but a call for engaging thought and reality in light of a radical exteriority that puts into question even the very grounds of Cerutti Guldberg’s critique of Dussel. Such an observation, however, no longer remains with Dussel’s own language; rather, it refers to the sensibility we found underlying his thought in his early work Philosophy of Liberation and later in his appeal to the concept of life. Therefore, here the reply comes with Dussel and, as we will see, from outside Dussel’s own manner of thinking. Moreover, with this response we are already moving to a certain extent beyond what was the philosophy of liberation. As we will see in the following chapters, in departure from Dussel’s thought various

Delimitations . . . of Dussel’s Philosophy | 81 contemporary Latin American thinkers will put into question not only the scientific approach and rationalist subjectivity but also the discourse of liberation of Cerutti Guldberg and Dussel.

Dussel’s Approach to Liberation through the Recognition of Those Excluded by Western Philosophy In his essay “Leopoldo Zea’s Project of a Philosophy of Latin American History,”17 presented in 1992 in honor of Zea’s eightieth birthday, Enrique Dussel draws a sharp differentiation between the position of philosophers of liberation such as himself and Augusto Salazar Bondy and the previous work of Leopoldo Zea. Dussel’s differentiation is made in relation to Salazar Bondy’s critique, that is, his thesis that up to 1968 there was no authentic Latin American philosophy but only a series of imitations and weak mixtures of European and North American thought. As Dussel explains: I do not refute the history of a liberating Latin American thought. What I do refute, together with Salazar Bondy, is the existence of a Latin American critical philosophy that is in a ‘stage of philosophical normalcy’ [etapa de normalidad filosófica] and has been able to affirm itself as Latin American philosophy, while being recognized as an expression of universal philosophy, a philosophy that is practiced in the main programs of philosophical studies and not in the specialized area of Latin American studies or in a program related to a specific university chair; in other words, philosophy in a restricted sense (en un sentido restringido), according to the definition of the ‘hegemonic Euro-North American philosophical community.’18 This philosophy in the restricted sense must be distinguished from philosophy understood as ‘Latin American philosophy of history’ (‘filosofía de la historia latinoamericana’) or as a historico-fundamental hermeneutics of the ‘world of everyday life.’19

Dussel then goes on: According to my interpretation, Zea’s ‘Latin American philosophy’ is a hermeneutics that makes explicit a presupposed attitude in the ‘understanding’ of the world (verstehen in a Heideggerian sense) from which the work of philosophy itself ‘in a restricted sense’ can start. (I am saying ‘restricted sense’ in order not to judge whether it is philosophy ‘in the strict sense.’) Zea’s project is in a stage of ‘pre-comprehension.’20

The key differentiation here is between Zea’s historical hermeneutics in its attentiveness to a general thought in a culture and people’s lives, on the one hand, and philosophy “in a restricted sense” on the other hand. Following this way of situating Zea’s philosophy, Dussel concludes: “Latin American philosophers must elaborate a hermeneutics that can discover the meaning of their own history and reality, an impressive task carried out by Zea.”21 This task requires the most fundamental method of all, the recognition of “opinions of the ‘world of everyday life’ from which the principles of science and even of philosophy in the strict sense can be thought.”22 Thus, Dussel concludes,

82 | Identity, Dependency, and the Project of Liberation I think that Zea’s ‘Latin American philosophy of history’ is situated on this historicofundamental level. . . . I think Zea is right in this. In this sense, all great Latin American thinkers (to name only a few: Bartolomé de las Casas, Clavijero, Bolívar, Alberdi, Martí) have thought on the basis of their own reality and with the purpose of affirming what is Latin American (lo latinoamericano). It is not in this sense that Salazar Bondy and I have spoken of ‘imitative philosophy.’ 23

Leopoldo Zea’s philosophy makes a claim for a fundamental ground for thought, and for what is Latin American, although, as noted above, Zea’s philosophy concerns a pre-comprehension or interpretation of the world that remains to be engaged in a more philosophically restricted sense. At one level, the problem is that Westernized thought excludes and dismisses the history Zea recognizes. The hegemonic Euro-North American philosophical community (Popper, Austin, Ricoeur, Vattimo, Habermas, Charles Taylor, and Rorty, to name some philosophers from philosophical hegemonic countries) and even the hegemonic ‘philosophical community’ in Latin America (in faculties, institutes, research councils, and so forth) ignore all peripheral philosophical thought (from Latin America, Africa, Asia) and dismiss it as not relevant, pertinent, or central. . . . It is a position of exclusion that is imitated by the colonial ‘universalist’ philosophers. And it is with respect to this supposedly universal ‘philosophy’ (to be precise European and North American) that we are excluded.24

Dussel then identifies three problems for Latin American philosophy. The first two we have already discussed: to think with awareness of the place of Latin American philosophy in world history and to think from the Latin American situation. But the third presents a crucial problem that goes beyond Zea’s thought and exposes a central concern for Dussel. Latin Americans, and the excluded in general, must learn “to think in such a way that they can ‘enter’ the discussion with this ‘hegemonic philosophical community.’”25 Because they are “excluded” from it, those from the periphery must “interpolate” the center, so that their own philosophical discourse will be “recognized.”26 The question is, then, how one understands this interpolation and the terms of recognition. Dussel is clear about the fact that the “recognition” of the hegemonic community is not the origin of our philosophy. Given the situation of exclusion, however, it is necessary to engage in a self-affirmation that may result in the recognition of the excluded by the hegemonic community. The point seems straightforward: one must make oneself understandable to the other (Westernized thought). But Dussel goes on and states that only through this recognition may philosophical dialogue of our own (Latin American, in this case) become “creative, respectful, and rigorous.”27 Dussel concludes with respect to Zea’s thought: “In this aspect [of recognition by interpolation], a ‘history of Latin American thought’ (even in the form of a ‘Latin American philosophy of history’) is not sufficient anymore.”28

Delimitations . . . of Dussel’s Philosophy | 83 Again, at the simplest level this seems a self-evident point; only by making sense to the hegemonic structures may one enter in dialogue with them. Then Dussel goes on to explain how the recognition becomes possible. It is now necessary to resort to the whole range of discourse, the problematics, and the methods of this ‘hegemonic philosophical community,’ in order to elaborate our challenges on the basis of their own rules: as a distinct reality (marginal, dominated, and exploited) and as a philosophy in the strict sense that is still excluded.29

Being even more specific about what this would mean, Dussel explains: This need for an argumentation that makes use of the discourse of hegemonic philosophy from the position of ‘a reality as an exteriority not thought by its thinkers’ (‘una realidad como exterioridad no pensada por ellos’) forces us, at the same time, to construct and reconstruct new universal categories, and develop new methodological aspects (valid for Africa and Asia, but also for Europe and the United States).30

The fundamental difference between Zea and Dussel, as the latter understands it, is that Zea only does the groundwork for philosophy and does not reach a philosophical discourse in the restricted (and perhaps strict) sense. Dussel’s thought engages in the categorical articulation of this historical reality in a manner that no longer allows for the exclusion of the reality Zea has rightly recognized as Latin American self-knowledge throughout the history of Latin American thought. Dussel’s work seeks to overcome the exclusion of this reality and history. This would occur by using the whole range of issues, questions, discourses, and methods employed by the hegemonic European–North American philosophical community in order to have Latin American philosophy recognized. As we heard, Dussel is clear that the question of recognition is not the origin of Latin American philosophy. However, the question for us at this point is to what extent the conditions set up for thought in seeking this recognition give up or abandon the very possibility of developing a distinct Latin American philosophy (of developing philosophical discourses that allow for the articulation of lives and manners of knowledge distinct from those held in place by Western traditional thought in its hegemonic forms). This is particularly an issue given that Dussel has already stated that it is in this way that Latin America’s reality and thought may become “creative, respectful, and rigorous.”31 I believe Dussel is right in pointing out the exclusion of Latin American, Asian, and African philosophies from the general cannon of philosophy that is restricted by the Westernized philosophical traditions. Moreover, as a practical matter, the development of discourses analogous to Western thought seems essential. I take the publication of the encyclopedia titled El pensamiento filosófico latinoamericano, del Caribe y “latino” (1300–2000) (Latin American, Caribbean, and “Latino” Philosophical Thought [1300–2000]) to be such an important paideutic occasion.32 But one must ask: whence the “restricted” sense of philosophy and

84 | Identity, Dependency, and the Project of Liberation the need for recognition in terms of this restricted sense? Is it not in the discourse’s rationalist restrictions with respect to what may be considered philosophical knowledge, and in the epistemic limitations that underlie those parameters, that one finds the exclusive character of Western thought and its canon? Would not adopting Western rationality only repeat the exclusion by remaining wedded to a manner of thought that excludes other ways of conceiving and articulating distinct lives? Must thought be translated into analytical, argumentative knowledge as conceived by Western modernity in order to be counted as philosophically relevant? Does this attachment to the restricted sense of philosophy not invite us to dismiss—just as the Western canon has done—literature and art, traditional oral traditions, and essay writing as proper and distinct ways of thinking that do not need to be translated into philosophy but rather afford us the occasion to rethink the very sense of philosophy? Does not indigenous knowledge offer the possibility for the transformation of philosophical thought, rather than the mere occasion for them to be translated into the already established epistemic canons of philosophical knowledge? To say it yet in another way central to the present book and the issue we have already introduced: Does the rationalist turn not risk becoming an impediment for engaging the aesthetic dimensions of liberation beyond Western rationalism and its metaphysics of presence? We may put the aesthetic question and the problem with a rationalist approach akin to the tradition of modern rationalist thinking in a different perspective, namely, in terms of the hermeneutical sense of language. From a hermeneutical perspective in the broader sense, the unfolding of identities and their determinations happens in the very occurrence and movement of language. This happens in an aesthetic register, that is, in light of the existential experiences, pre-conscious sensibilities, dispositions, embodied articulate experiences, lineages, memories, and histories that inform language and in it our configurations of senses of being. Therefore, to adopt the rationalist discourses and methods of the colonizing hegemonic tradition becomes analogous to giving up the very possibility of unfolding spaces for knowledge, configurations of senses of lives, and epistemic possibilities distinct from Western modern and postmodern thought. Moreover, the issues from exteriority and the sense of exteriority that would transform the hegemonic philosophical world cannot be heard in their difference if the language, approach, and even concerns of the hegemonic colonizing tradition are employed for their articulation. What if not a colonizing gesture would it be to translate Mayan traditions into Western language and into the methods that will organize the very reception as well as the character of the phenomena that are being engaged? How does a rationalism that insists on a mind-body dualism come to engage the aesthetic experiences of the colonized beyond that very prejudice and rationalist, objectifying manner of seeing the world?

Delimitations . . . of Dussel’s Philosophy | 85 Dussel closes by pointing out that from the exteriority of the Latin American distinct situation other concepts must be made that are valid to the excluded as well as to the oppressor. This is the universal point of recognition, when a certain conceptual knowledge may be given articulation in the language of the hegemonic center. But isn’t the very history that Zea recognizes lost if it must be translated into the other’s conceptual language without recourse to loss (I mean without leaving the leeway for a distinctness that cannot be judged, comprehended, manipulated, re-presented, and controlled or dismissed by the discourse of the center)? To refer to a figure close to Dussel’s thought: When Rigoberta Menchú learns Spanish in order to have her peoples and lineages, their histories and oppression, recognized, she is clear about the fact that there is something that remains secret and lost, and that is the originary insight that remains distinct. At the same time, one may think of Gloria Anzaldúa’s language. In her own words: I am a border woman. I grew up between two cultures. . . . I have been straddling that tejas-Mexican border, and others, all my life. It’s not a comfortable territory to live in, this place of contradictions. Hatred, anger and exploitation are the prominent features of this landscape . . . However, there have been compensations for this mestizaje, and certain joys. . . . I have a sense that certain ‘faculties’—not just in me but in every border resident, colored or non-colored—and dormant areas of consciousness are being activated, awakened. . . . This book, then, speaks of my existence. My preoccupations with the inner life of the Self, and with the struggle of that Self amidst adversity and violation; with the confluence of primordial images; with the unique positionings consciousness takes at these confluent streams; and with my almost instinctive urge to communicate, to speak, to write about life on the borders, life in the shadows.33

I quote Anzaldúa at length in order to illustrate what is at stake and is in peril of being given up when one takes up the conceptual, logical, and inseparably production-driven explications for existence Dussel finds necessary. Anzaldúa and Menchú offer articulations of existence that do not require the kind of analysis and conceptual-logical determination Dussel deems necessary for the excluded to be heard. Neither Anzaldúa’s nor Menchú’s articulate existence requires logical justification along the lines of Dussel’s Western interlocutors. And neither of them understands their experience as rational and opposed to the irrational, objective presence of bodies, nature, and humans as biological facts or objective rational beings. Their hermeneutical space requires listening and sufficient sense and sensibility.34 The radical exteriority that Dussel seeks by answering to the requirements of the discourse of the oppressor is not just another fact that needs rational elucidation along with all other facts available to the rationalist and materialist interpretation of distinct and fecund configurations of existences. As long as one supposes that there is a rational, objective point from which phenomena may be articulated, and that language functions as a tool of that rational,

86 | Identity, Dependency, and the Project of Liberation objective subjectivity, Dussel’s proposition works. However, when considered in light of radical exteriority as the experience of aesthetic sensibilities and articulate ways of being that occur beyond Western modern rationalism, pursuing recognition through the hegemonic philosophical discourse only limits Dussel’s way of understanding philosophical thought. Indeed, in the essay we have been discussing, Dussel himself points out that the origin of a philosophy of liberation is not the discourse of philosophy in the restricted sense. But at this point we are looking at an ambiguity that requires further discussion: To what extent will Dussel follow Western thought in the name of radical exteriority and the recognition of the excluded?

Touching on Life: Dussel’s Argument in the Name of Radical Exteriority The question of attentiveness to life’s distinct or singular configurations is in Dussel the turn to the other in his or her distinct situation, the situation in exteriority of the oppressed, excluded, and exploited, the poor that concretely do not have enough to eat, the bereft of all, the ones who can only await their imminent death. As we already saw in the previous chapter, his emphasis on the living circumstance of the other as the guiding principle for philosophy grounds Dussel’s major work Ethics of Liberation: In the Age of Globalization and Exclusion as well as his three volumes of the Politics of Liberation.35 But the issue now is how Dussel takes up this question in his later work, after the criticisms we have just heard and in response to them. One key moment on the issue of life and the development of Dussel’s thought is his long dialogue with Habermas and Karl-Otto Apel. Indeed, it is as a result of these conversations that he will be led to the writing of the Ethics of Liberation.36 The dialogue begins with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. As was the case in 1942 when Leopoldo Zea wrote his “Concerning an American Philosophy” (“En torno a una filosofía americana”),37 Dussel enters this dialogue at a critical moment for Europe. In this case it is the moment when Europe finds itself exposed to its otherness and at the same time to a change that will put into question the possible grounds for a universal ethics. Dussel sees in Habermas and Apel attempts to find a philosophical discourse that may ground an ethics which recognizes the other and does so in awareness of the exclusions suffered throughout history to date. The diverging point occurs precisely with respect to the way the other is engaged. In the case of both German philosophers, all ethical claims are grounded on a communicating community. This claim to an already operative communicating community falls short of Dussel’s sense of radical exteriority, particularly with respect to the total exteriority that is constitutive of the experience of the excluded and exploited, the experience that grounds the philosophy of liberation. In Dussel’s sense, the history of the other, the periphery’s history, has never been part of the communicating community but rather

Delimitations . . . of Dussel’s Philosophy | 87 has been always excluded from it. Thus, to ground ethics on communication prior to any ethical claim would mean shutting down ethics from its very source, namely, from the claim made on the communicating community by the excluded. As Dussel sees it, prior to the communicating community appears the living community. This differentiation also leads Dussel to his critical engagement with hermeneutical claims to an ethical openness out of a linguistic context of interpretation, as made in different ways by Paul Ricoeur and Gianni Vattimo. As I noted in the previous chapter, Dussel recalls in the second volume of the Politics of Liberation: “Against Gianni Vattimo, who affirms: ‘There are no facts, only interpretations!’ I replied to him in Bogotá: ‘There are facts, which are always interpreted!’” 38 An important corollary to this emphasis on life is the question of life as the very ground of any ethics with a claim to goodness.39 Still in debate with Habermas and Apel, Dussel questions their attempt to recognize the particular or distinct situation of ethical claims from a universal speech act. For Habermas and Apel two different kinds of claims may be recognized. One is the discourse of justification, which refers to the theoretical, conceptual principles that ground an ethical claim. The other is the discourse of application, which refers to specific historical situations. For Dussel, this differentiation remains insufficient, inasmuch as the particular situation only appears in light of an already operative ethical view. In short, the differentiation does not overcome the hegemonic position that decides about the life of the excluded before engaging their reality. But however critical of the work of Habermas and Apel Dussel might be, he finds in them a positive and crucial move away from the abandonment of the idea of a universal ethics, a negative move Dussel sees to occur with deconstruction and postmodern movements in philosophy. Dussel’s Ethics of Liberation, his major work, is guided precisely by this task of finding a universal foundation for any claim to goodness. A claim may be universal if it begins from the suffering of the other and when that living fact puts the already operative ethical claims to goodness in the standing system into question. Again, it is in our exposure to and with the life of the poor, the oppressed, the exploited that we become ethical. This is why in his introduction to his Ethics of Liberation Dussel mentions along with Apel and Habermas his dialogue with Hinkelammert’s ethics of life.40 In these exchanges Dussel accomplishes something similar to Zea’s aim concerning the entrance of Latin American philosophy into the Western philosophical dialogue: he engages Western thought through a form of thought that Western philosophy recognizes. I believe, however, that in doing so he neglects the kind of aesthetic sensibility and exposed thought I find he makes possible with his discussion of radical proximity in total exteriority as early as 1977. With this turn to rationalism and pragmatism, rather than phenomenology and postmodern thought, I think that Dussel falls short of his own insight concerning the

88 | Identity, Dependency, and the Project of Liberation engagement of the distinctness or singularities that he himself introduces early in his work. In his dialogues Dussel turns to a kind of universal rationalism in order to make the voice of the excluded recognized. As we saw above, Dussel is clearly pointing to this rationalist turn already when he speaks of the difference between Leopoldo Zea and the philosophy of liberation as conceived by himself and Augusto Salazar Bondy.41

Dussel’s Sense of the Rational and its Relationship to Philosophy In order to fully understand Dussel’s rationalism we must discuss his redefinition of rationality as well as the way rationality relates to philosophy in the restricted sense. Here I will discuss some of his remarks on these issues in “A New Age in the History of Philosophy: The World Dialogue between Philosophical Traditions.” 42 As the title indicates, the issue that we have been engaging is at the work’s center, that is, the question of how one would establish a dialogue between distinct philosophical traditions. As Dussel sees it, all of humanity shares certain general human problems or “core problems.” These arise as humans come to face the bewilderment of encountering their situation or existence. Dussel characterizes these core problems in the following terms: What are real things in their totality and how do they behave? Such questions encompass phenomena ranging from the astronomical to the simple falling of a stone or the artificial production of fire. They also encompass the mystery of human subjectivity, the ego, interiority, spontaneity, as well as the nature of freedom and the creation of the social and ethical world. In the end, they arrive at the question of how we interpret the ultimate foundation of everything that is real, and the universe itself, which in turn leads to the classic ontological question: ‘Why being and not nothingness?’ These basic ‘core problems’ have inevitably been faced by all human communities since the remotest period of the Paleolithic age; they are among the many possible variations of the universal ‘whys,’ and are present in every culture and tradition.43

In the face of life, existence, and the astonishment of being, one responds, and it is this articulation of reality in the response that is rationality: The content and the way of responding to these ‘core problems’ unleashes, impels, and disperses diverse trajectories of rational narratives, if by rationality we understand simply that reasons have been provided in support of assertions, and that these assertions are intended to interpret or explain phenomena that have ‘appeared’ at the initial level of each of these ‘core problems.’44

Thus, rationality is the giving of reasons that support an assertion for the sake of giving articulation to existence. Here Dussel follows a traditional formulation of philosophy as being grounded on logical argumentative reasoning: reasons must be provided that support assertions. However, a closer look reveals an important detail: this rationality is not analytical but rather narrative. Dussel will develop his understanding of rationality out of Paul Ricoeur’s work. As Dussel explains,

Delimitations . . . of Dussel’s Philosophy | 89 humanity has always and inevitably given linguistic expression to a rational response to the core problems.45 And such response occurs not as an analytical process but rather as “a process involving the ‘production of myths’ (mytho-poiesis).” 46 Dussel does not separate lógos from mythos as does the modern Western tradition, ascribing irrationality to myth and rationality, understood as logical understanding and analysis, to the lógos. Instead, as he points out, “We have become accustomed, in the context of explanations of the transition from mythos to lógos, to understand this process as a leap from the irrational to the rational, from the concretely empirical to the universal, and from the realm of the senses to the realm of concepts. This is false. They are both rational.” 47 But how are they connected? Dussel explains the connection between myth and lógos as being both elements of rationality: The production of myths was the first rational form of interpretation or explanation of reality (of the world, subjectivity, the ethical practical horizon, and the ultimate reference of reality that is described symbolically). From this perspective myths are symbolic narratives that are not irrational and that do not refer exclusively to singular phenomena. They are symbolic enunciations, and therefore have a ‘double meaning’ that can only be fully elucidated through a hermeneutical process that uncovers the layers of reasoning behind them. It is in this sense that they are rational, and that they must be grasped in terms of the extent to which their content has a universal significance, given their reference to circumstances that are susceptible to repetition and constructed upon the basis of concepts (cerebral categorizations or cerebral maps that involve millions of neurons and imply the convergence in meaning of multiple and singular empirical phenomena that human beings must confront).48

Myths are explanations that refer to the whole as well as to the particular and situate the latter in light of the first. This recognition of myth as rationality is fundamental for recognizing the excluded discourses of those ignored and silenced throughout the instauration of rationalist instrumental modernity over all other forms of life, peoples, and cultures to date. But for Dussel the rationality in myths is not explicit. Myths speak in symbols that remain to be interpreted and deciphered. Therefore, the rationality in myth becomes evident only when “fully elucidated through a hermeneutical process that uncovers the layers of reasoning behind them.” 49 Here one finds that the recognition of other ways of articulating existence is founded and depends on rational, conceptual, logical patterns of knowledge; this is the epistemic space for philosophical knowledge. Thus, the memories, stories, practices, and experiences gathered from outside the Western rationalist world by the indigenous, the African, will gain their significance only when they are brought under reason. This follows the hermeneutical cycle in Ricoeur’s thought from reason’s engagement with the narrative foundations of culture to the return to reason through the logical, argumentative articulation of the meaning constituted by the narrative. From the point of view of

90 | Identity, Dependency, and the Project of Liberation traditional philosophy, all works of art require explanation; neither the work nor the artist knows its meaning until the philosopher articulates it. This is a position that Dussel and Ricoeur share. As Dussel himself puts it: Each of the narratives at issues has a certain degree of rationality, but their specific character varies. There is a progression in terms of degrees of univocal precision, semantic clarity, simplicity, and in the conclusive force with which their [the narratives’] foundations have been laid. But there are also losses in multiplicity of meaning when symbols are displaced, which can, however be hermeneutically rediscovered in diverse moments and places (as is characteristic of mythical rational narratives). For example the Promethean or Adamic myths continue to have ethical meaning today. Thus univocal rational discourse as expressed in philosophical categories that are capable of defining conceptual content without recourse to symbols (as in a myth) gains in precision but loses in terms of its resonance of meaning. All of this nonetheless implies an important civilizable advance, which opens up the possibility of abstraction in modes of analysis. Here, the separation of the semantic content of the phenomenon being observed—the description and precise explanation of empirical reality—enables the observer’s management to be more efficient in the reproduction and development of human life in community.50

Within the rational there is a progression or hierarchy of meaning. This hierarchy is established according to specific expectations, “degrees of univocal precision, semantic clarity, simplicity, and in the conclusive force with which their foundations have been laid.”51 Myth remains at the level of the symbol, and thus it is obscure and ambiguous, subject to displacement and loss. By contrast, philosophical categories gain in precision while they lose in resonance of meaning. In making the transition from myth to philosophical discourse something is lost and may be hermeneutically rediscovered. Moreover, when reason in its analytical philosophical form turns to the foundations of human narratives, “an important civilizing advance” occurs.52 Knowledge becomes abstract, and what was once a logic of the local may be transferred to entire communities, ultimately allowing for human community to develop. This is a very important point: community comes from the articulation of the singular by an abstract way of understanding that will allow for engagements between different groups or people. If, as we saw above, the communicating community cannot be taken as a given, it must be formed through the philosophical discourse that recognizes its basic operative structures, both in a critical sense as well as in terms of the concepts required for building community (as we saw in the prior chapter in our discussion of Dussel’s Politics of Liberation.) From this separation between the symbolic and the analytical one may begin to see Dussel’s definition of the philosopher’s task: From a historical perspective the ‘lovers of myths’ were also, strictly speaking, ‘lovers of wisdom,’ and this is why those who will later be described as philosophers should be

Delimitations . . . of Dussel’s Philosophy | 91 described more aptly as philo-logists, if lógos is understood to mean a rational discourse that employs philosophical categories and no longer has recourse to mythical symbolic narrative, or only exceptionally and as an example of how philosophical hermeneutics holds sway.53

The philosopher is the one who no longer follows the mythical narratives but is able to abstract and by means of analytical reasoning give articulation to the meaning underlying the mythical. Dussel concludes: This process of leaving behind the purest form of mythical rational expression and stripping away its symbolic content gradually emerged in all of the great urban cultures of the Neolithic. This process gives certain terms or words a univocal, definable meaning with conceptual content that is the fruit of methodical analytical elaboration and is capable of moving from the whole to the parts as it fixes its specific meaning.54

As we saw in Salazar Bondy, Dussel agrees that ultimately it is rational, analytical analysis and interpretation that will grant recognition to the existence of those excluded. Moreover, analytical reasoning explains what other forms of discourse or expression cannot express. This is why in order for the excluded to be recognized, the lives and articulate configurations of existence in radical exteriority must be brought under the clarifying language of philosophy, understood as logical, conceptual knowledge. In short, although Dussel recognizes the reasoning of exteriority beyond Western rationality, when he engages this radical exteriority he does so on the grounds of that very rationalist prejudice that appropriates distinct cultures and forms of articulations of existence. When the knowledge of the excluded appears, it will do so through rational, analytical knowledge, and it will be recognized under and participate in the universality of rational knowledge. This way of understanding the very character of philosophy and of defining rationality by differentiating a rational, conceptual, analytical knowledge that is universal from a mythical unclear, localized, and dispersed way of engaging reality repeats the Western standard by virtue of which the other must prove its rationality and may enter universal understanding if and only if it is logically and conceptually sound. In other words, no matter how distinct, all existence must make sense in logical, analytical, and conceptual terms. The issue is that Dussel in his rationalist categorization loses the distinctness of lives to which he had exposed thought. This happens when those distinct lives are resituated or appropriated in content and form as they are translated into the language of modern Western rationalist philosophy. One finds Dussel’s analytical position clearly at work in the way he incorporates Latin American thought into philosophy. When Dussel must cite the philosophers of Latin America outside the Western canon, some of the main figures are Guaman Poma de Ayala, who writes to the King of Spain a detailed argument concerning the irrationality of the behavior of the conquerors, and Bartolomé de las Casas, who argues for the rationality of the indigenous peoples in Valladolid.55

92 | Identity, Dependency, and the Project of Liberation What may put into question reason is not the indigenous articulation of existence taken as a thought from radical exteriority but a thinking that is philosophy in that it repeats the manner of thinking and disposition toward existence developed through Western modernity.

The Philosophy of Liberation at the Limit of Aesthesis and Postmodernity In his essay “The ‘Philosophy of Liberation,’ the Post-Modern Debate, and Latin American Studies,” Dussel responds to the postmodern turn. In order to engage his response I will first have to quote his conclusions to some length. In closing his essay and in response to the critiques and figures we have been discussing and others, Dussel writes: All of the above mentioned was in part intuited by the Philosophy of Liberation since its inception, and if not it can at least be gleaned from, incorporated into and reconstructed from its discourse. Nevertheless, and with respect to new epistemic proposals, the Philosophy of Liberation continues to hold its own position, as much in the centers of study in Latin America as in the United States and Europe. In the first place, it is a ‘philosophy’ that can enter into a dialogue with literary criticism and assimilate itself to it (and to all of the above-mentioned movements: Postmodernism, Subaltern Studies, Cultural Studies, Post-Colonial Reason, meta-criticism of Latin Americanism such as Moreiras’, etc.). As a critical philosophy, the Philosophy of Liberation has a very specific role: it should study the more abstract, general, philosophical, theoretical framework of ‘testimonial’ literature (I prefer to refer to it as an ‘epic’ narrative, as a creative expression related to new social movements that impact civil society). In the third place it should analyze and set the basis for a method, for general categories, and for the very theoretical discourse of all of these critical movements which, having been inspired by Foucault, Lyotard, Baudrillard, Derrida, etc., should be ‘reconstructed’ from a global perspective (since they, for the most part, speak in a Eurocentric manner). In this process of reconstruction, the need to articulate an intercultural dialogue (if there were one) within the parameters of a globalizing system should be taken into consideration. The dualism globalization-exclusion (the new aporia that ought not be reduced to a fetishistic simplification) frames the problem presented by the other dimensions. It would still be possible to reflect upon anti-foundationalism, of the Rortyian sort for example, which is accepted by many Postmodernists. It is not merely a defense of reason for reason itself. It is about defending the victims of the present system, defending human life in danger of collective suicide. The critique of ‘modern reason’ does not allow Philosophy of Liberation to confuse it with a critique of reason as such, or with particular types or practices of rationality. On the contrary, the critique of modern reason is made in the name of a differential rationality (the reason used by feminist movements, environmentalists, cultural and ethnic movements, the working class, peripheral nations . . . etc.) and a universal rationality (a practical-material, discursive, strategic, instrumental, critical form of reason) (See Dussel 1998b). The affirmation and emancipation of Difference is constructing a novel and future universality. The question is not Difference or Universality but rather Universality in Difference and Difference in Universality.56

Delimitations . . . of Dussel’s Philosophy | 93 What I find central in this response is the way Dussel situates his thought with respect to deconstruction. As he sees them, these movements against the great Western narrative, the myth of progress, and the ego cogito’s absolute primacy with respect to knowledge and the articulation of existence were anticipated by or may be incorporated into the philosophy of liberation. Moreover, the philosophy of liberation is the philosophical movement able to engage the diverse forms of critique and new attempts to give articulation to the other. However, instead of following through and engaging these ways of thinking by ultimately putting into question and exposing the play of difference that underlies rationality and that in slipping from rationality figures rationality’s own undoing, Dussel reverts to a rational meta-discourse that intends to ground conceptually the movement of deconstruction and the dissemination undergone when one thinks with it. Thus, Dussel situates his thought by stating that philosophy of liberation “should analyze and set the basis for a method, for general categories, and for the very theoretical discourse of all of these critical movements [deconstruction and the kinds of critiques we have been discussing].”57 Dussel’s response shows that he thinks of philosophy as the task of interpreting other kinds of discourse, analyzing reality, and making rational arguments that will ground the reconfiguration of philosophy in the name of the excluded. Differential rationality and universal rationality go hand in hand as aspects of a logical, argumentative approach to existence. And although the ultimate aim is to overcome the difference between difference and universality, this overcoming occurs in a manner that does not put into question the traditional argumentative logic that grounds Western thought. In his response to his critics in “The Philosophy of Liberation, the Post-Modern Debate, and Latin American Studies,” Dussel concludes that “the Philosophy of Liberation is a post-modern movement avant la lettre.”58 This is the case because the philosophy of liberation arises from the evocation of the other (of radical proximate exteriority) from the very exteriority that Western postmodern thought has sought while remaining Eurocentric in its search and articulation of it. As we have seen through our discussion of Dussel’s work in this and the last chapters, his work offers an insight that may well transform how philosophy is understood, since it not only calls for philosophy to think in relation to alterity (as is the case for Levinas) but does so by making this alterity a living reality that cannot remain a matter of conceptual skepticism. Alterity as the distinct (lo distinto) becomes the critical case for the ongoing reinvention of Western modern thought. Philosophy must arise also from the distinct lives of those who until yesterday, or to this day, believe they are nothing and whose existential horizon is the colonial system of Western hegemonic production of power and knowledge in the name of progress. In light of Dussel’s thought one may begin from below. However, this same liberating thought is sustained by a modality of thinking that does not yet engage the fecund existence of being and thinking in radical exteri-

94 | Identity, Dependency, and the Project of Liberation ority. This is because when Dussel appeals to exteriority, his thought is grounded on the self-certainty of reasoning, in its analytical form, and on the interpretation of life as pragmatic facts of reality or history. These are the elements with which he develops his analysis of lives in radical and total exteriority. Dussel’s philosophical thought, in spite of his insight and intention, situates him within pragmatism, analytical philosophy, and utilitarianism as he drifts away from phenomenology and the challenges of deconstruction that remain simply outside his thought. Indeed, the latter ways of thinking and their critiques never lead him to put the manner and disposition of his discourse into question. This occurs while certain fundamental elements and positions from traditional philosophy remain unquestioned: The task of the philosopher as the interpreter of truth; the idea that other forms of articulations of reality may serve philosophy but the disciplines remains distinctly divided; the resolution of all articulations of senses of lives into a clarity defined by rationalism as the analytical tool that ultimately produces philosophical knowledge; the unquestioning acceptance of materialism and subjectivism as fundaments for thought; the idea that humanity is historical and in spite of its many currents ultimately follows one line of development (in spite of recognizing various histories, the philosophy of liberation becomes a pivotal point for philosophy as a whole); the sense that being human means mediation in the senses of the necessary calculative and productive manipulation of “nature”; ultimately, the idea that the way to understand others and give articulation to their needs is through rational, empirical analysis. Dussel’s thought is sustained by an ambiguity between a radical prelinguistic sense of radical exteriority and the insistence on thinking within the parameters of analytical and instrumental conceptual reasoning.59 This ambiguity becomes a difficult issue for us, since it ultimately becomes an impediment to an aesthetics of liberation, given that ultimately experience finds sense through rational discourses and objective explanations that leave behind “myth” as well as any prerational experience. Indeed, if one took seriously the experience of encounters with distinct lives and articulations of existence that do not correspond with or may be subsumed by Western rationalism, how would one experience thought? What would be a trans-modern pluriversal philosophical dialogue? In recognizing this limit in Dussel’s work one must wonder about how to engage the reality he has made evident for us and how to do so in light of the concrete living and embodied exteriority at play in such engagement. This must also lead unavoidably to a thinking that is always already put into question by the radical exteriority that situates it but does not belong to thought as its (genitive) other. With these questions we point ahead and begin to engage liberation beyond Dussel’s way of thinking. In closing this chapter, in order to gather the insights we have found in Dussel’s work and the complexity we have touched on, I would like to turn to César

Delimitations . . . of Dussel’s Philosophy | 95 Vallejo, that Peruvian poet who has taught many of us Latin Americans so much about living at the periphery in articulate dignity. In “El Buen Sentido” (“Good Sense”), Vallejo writes: “Hay madre, un sitio en el mundo, que se llama Paris. Un sitio muy grande y lejano y otra vez grande.” (Mother, there is a place in the world called Paris. A place large and distant and again large.)60 He writes this sentence twice, once at the beginning and then almost at the end, the second time followed by the closing words: “La mujer de mi padre, al oirme, almuerza y sus ojos mortales descienden suavemente por mis brazos.” (My father’s wife, in hearing me, eats her lunch and her mortal eyes softly descend along my arms.)61 I hear in Vallejos’s words the sensibility we found behind the philosophy of liberation. I hear in his words to his mother a relationship of memory and loss: the memory of a proximity that is always tacitly there, and the loss of an origin that cannot be recovered in the encounter with the other who does not belong to him. He writes in the same poem, “My farewell arose from a point in her being, more external than the point of her being to which I return.” 62 Vallejo finds his mother with a sense of proximity inseparable from her otherness beyond him. This is an affective, articulate sense of experience never available to the univocity and precision of rationalism. And from that situation he writes a line practically unimaginable for most of us: “There is a place in the world, a place large and distant called Paris.” Here we meet Vallejo’s articulate sense of his situation, one sustained by proximity, the other, and now, radical lived exteriority. What is Paris here if not a figure of a topology of sheer exteriority? By contrast, we might ask ourselves: Who among us does not know where or what Paris is? But, what is it that we know, and what does this knowledge tell us? Perhaps, unlike Vallejo, unaware of our proximities and distances, we still know too well that our parents are “our parents,” that London or Washington DC is the center of the world, and that in order to be heard one must speak and think in a way that honors “our parents” and that does not seem too strange to those who see life through London, Paris, and Washington DC. But this awareness will lead to a realization of another reality beyond Western thought, a decolonial thinking that we will begin to engage next and for which the previous chapters up to this point have been preparatory.

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PA RT 2 The Decolonial Turn and the Dissemination of Philosophies

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5

Beyond the Domination of the “Coloniality of Power and Knowledge” Latin America’s Living Ana-Chronic Temporality and the Dissemination of Philosophy

In the previous chapters we have seen a constant attentiveness in Latin American thinkers toward thinking in light of their concrete situation. This situated thought finds a profound opening in Enrique Dussel’s insight concerning Latin American thought as arising out of a radical exteriority beyond the possible control, determination, and manipulation of Western European and North American thought and culture. We also saw that such experience is pre-rational, inasmuch as it ultimately refers us to a sensibility found at the heart of the disposition that differentiates us as human, namely the encounter of other humans in a proximity sustained by a sense of total or radical exteriority. As we saw above, before the interpretation there is already the life that is to be interpreted, and that situates individual consciousness and rational discourse out of epiphany (rather than in terms of the hegemonic system of Being or comprehension). At the same time, we also saw that it is this sensibility that is put in danger under colonialism and the domination and dependency suffered by the peoples of the periphery. Moreover, in Dussel’s own thought we found an ambiguity marked by the manner in which he evokes the being of those in total exteriority and the radical exteriority afforded by this awareness concerning life beyond modern Western hegemonies. Along with this issue we found an aporia with respect to the very possibility of engaging the aesthetic character of liberation in its critical as well as affirmative modalities, namely the emphasis or return to a kind of rationalism (although in the name of the excluded, and in this crucial point of departure radically different from modern Western instrumental rationalism that accompanies capitalism, liberalism, imperialism, colonialism, and globalization). One may now ask how it is that the system of domination and dependency comes into being and how it is that even in Dussel’s case being in total exteriority and thinking in radical exteriority ultimately must turn to analytical instrumental discourses, thus reenacting lineages that underlie Western thought and its hegemonic logic. By

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100 | Decolonial Turn and Dissemination of Philosophies engaging these questions we will move toward understanding the possibilities for thinking out of the distinctness and peculiarities of excluded peoples and lives and in terms of their aesthetic dimension. As we will see now, by focusing on the work of Peruvian philosopher Aníbal Quijano, dependency and the turning away from being proximate in total exteriority occur through the colonization of the Americas and as the result of the development in the sixteenth century of certain orderings and lineages that become systems of domination over knowledge and being. Through these orderings and lineages arises the modern Western mind and its other, the non-Western, uncivilized, irrational, and dark peoples or “races.”1 This ordering will serve as the delimitating space for understanding what knowledge is and exploring its place and limits throughout the development of the sciences and humanities and in the history of Western philosophy. Ultimately these systems of domination and the delimitations of existence that are possible within them are sustained by a kind of disposition, a sense of temporality that operates as an aesthetic sensibility. This sensibility arises from these orderings of power and knowledge; it pre-rationally frames, directs, and limits any possible self-understanding and human knowledge. I will speak of this sensibility in terms of an aesthetic horizon in the later part of this chapter and call it the coloniality of time. (In chapter 10 we will see how Frantz Fanon encounters this sensibility and its limiting force, and how it may be overcome by a decolonial aesthetics.) Finally, following the question of temporality as aesthetic experience, in the last section of the chapter we will open another sense of temporality found in Quijano’s analysis of Latin American experience. As we will see, Latin American life in its distinct temporalities opens a space for thinking beyond the coloniality of power and knowledge and in light of distinct and singular Latin American articulations of senses of being and individual, as well as communal, humanity. This opening will allow us to begin to think from the radical exteriority Dussel exposes in his philosophy of liberation.

Beginning with Time In attempting to follow the dates inscribed in the pages of the Codex TellerianoRemensis, a book commissioned in the mid-sixteenth century by a European merchant and painted in Mexico by a tlacuilo, an indigenous painter-writer, one experiences a sense of disorientation.2 The marks that trace the dates and histories under the planetary movements of that ancient native civilization of the Americas are not quite graspable. This is not only because the marks are not readily understandable for a modern Western reader; they have been covered over by Arabic numbers in an attempt to match the Aztec calendar to the Gregorian system used then and to date by Westerners. The disorientation becomes more evident when one realizes that the new notations have themselves been once again marked over with new Arabic numbers and with written explanations

“Coloniality of Power and Knowledge” | 101 in Latin, Italian, and Spanish. It is as if time were at the tip of one’s fingers, only to slip again each time a hand wrote on what is by now a palimpsest. At the same time, the discomfort points to something itself difficult to grasp: in committing to that text, in reading that text, one is in a space of multiple temporalities. No translation of the Aztec calendar will produce a solution to the riddle of the overlapping of written and drawn marks, numbers, and letters. And yet one does stand there, with that irresolvable difference. One stands in a space of untranslatable multiple senses of time, now conscious of a seemingly impossible fit, conscious of reading in awareness of multiple temporalities at once. One stands at that moment recognizing distinct temporalities and placed by them at the limit of history as a matter of a single linear temporal development. It is this dense time-space in which our thoughts arise in multiple temporalities that I ultimately engage in this chapter. As we will see through the discussion, in Latin America one finds time as a sensibility that orients thought in a way distinct from the modern Western tradition. In the most general terms one may say that in modern Western thought one finds temporality as a transcendental intuition of the ego cogito, which is the unquestioned criterion for all rational cognition (Kant), and also as the movement of history, where history is understood as the concrete development of the ego cogito’s rational project or knowledge, a development understood to bear the destiny of humanity as a whole (Hegel). By contrast, in looking closely at Latin American experience, one finds simultaneous historical temporalities, an unbridled reality that goes well beyond the modern concept of a single history and rationalist development. I will ultimately argue that this uncovering of an alternative sense of temporality is what is required for a Latin American philosophy of liberation that thinks out of the concrete experiences of Latin American lives and that in doing so gives leeway for the articulate expression of the distinct lives and peoples gathered under the term “Latin America.”3 Two main points underlying this conclusion are, first, that this experience and sense of being in simultaneous temporalities is a distinct form of aesthetic sensibility and, second, that this sensibility offers one the opportunity to think history differently, intensifying the call for beginning to think out of one’s concrete and ephemeral life. Throughout the discussion I will understand temporality as the product of particular orderings of power and knowledge, a sense of time that orients and sets a horizon for the development of conceptual knowledge and senses of human life in terms of that ordering of power and knowledge. Thus, the shift in our understanding of temporality will figure a transformation of an aesthetic sensibility that underlies and informs reason, and in that shift we may open the possibility of the human project of freedom and equality beyond the Western modern philosophical tradition. Our central aim here is to expose the sense of temporality that operates as a fundamental sensibility under the coloniality of power and knowledge, which I

102 | Decolonial Turn and Dissemination of Philosophies will ultimately call the coloniality of time. But temporality never occurs outside of life; rather, the orderings of life carry in and with them and enact temporalities. Therefore the critique, the analysis, and the overcoming of the coloniality of power and knowledge will only be possible by pondering the concrete reality of distinct lives and peoples. However, without this first analysis of the sensibility or sense of temporality that serves as the pre-rational predisposition to the configuration and interpretation of experience, the concrete critique would always remain situated by the coloniality of time and its dispositions and limits. Throughout the chapter I use “time” to refer to the broadest fields of experiences of temporalities, while “temporality” refers specifically to the sense of time that arises from the configuration of specific systems of power and knowledge. When I speak of “the concept of time,” I also refer to the result of the development of modernity under the coloniality of power and knowledge. Finally, by pointing to the simultaneity of temporalities that one finds in Latin American experiences, this chapter leaves open the question of other senses of time that simply do not correspond to the modern project, temporalities that have been placed under the term “nature” by the coloniality of power and knowledge and that remain to be engaged in their interruptive character with respect to humanly conceived temporalities. To think in New York City or in the Lacando jungles is not the same, in part because the temporalities of cement and the jungle are not the same.

The Coloniality of Power and Knowledge In “Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Social Classification,” Aníbal Quijano exposes the origins and perpetuation of an economy of global power that begins with the colonization of America and continues to date under the project of globalization.4 He calls this system of oppression, exploitation, and exclusion the “coloniality of power and knowledge,” a system that underlies the development of modern Western identity in terms of the rational mind (ego cogito). The two basic elements at the heart of the system are the idea of one economic system that would subsume all previous ones (capitalism) and the notion of a natural racial difference that would situate peoples in their capacities, functions, potential, and role in the world in terms of their racial-geopolitical origins.5 Together, these two elements order the world and create a new human division. As Quijano shows, in the development of the Americas after the arrival of Columbus—and under the new developing orderings of the church and European economic interests—peoples of color, those who are descendants of Europeans, and the Europeans themselves each come to have a specific place and function in the constructed hierarchy. A difference in kind is created through a series of systems: by physically giving a place in the city to each “racial” group; by their work functions; and by their wage assignments (servant, slave, etc.). This series of racist and economiccapitalist allocations result in a social placement, and in turn, the social place-

“Coloniality of Power and Knowledge” | 103 ments give an epistemic place to those under such ordering. Together with the latter placement a certain potential and level of mental development and intelligence come to be assigned according to the racial, economical, and social situations. As a result, negros, indigenous peoples, become the other of reason and of the project of white and mestizo modernity in Latin America. This appropriative and destructive configuration of “the other” is crucial to the configuration of Western identity in its European and later North American forms of domination (this is the other side of modernity, the violent side Walter Mignolo fittingly calls the “dark side” of modernity). Given the new separation, the European mind may now distinguish itself from its “other,” an “other” that has never been in a dialectic relation of power with the West. Having constructed the other of Western rationalism, Europe and later North America may recognize themselves by contrast. They see themselves as origin and inheritors of reason and as angels of the project of freedom, equality, and justice that accompanies their version of the Enlightenment, which is a matter of calculative instrumental reasoning. With the constructions of new identities appears a subject among subjects, the thinking entity (res cogitans) and its other, which is also a potential thinking entity to the degree of intelligence and development allotted to it. Here the relationship of proximity in total exteriority, the uncanny element of the encounter of human to human recognized by Dussel as the basis for liberation, has been replaced by the relationship between two kinds of entities: one able to comprehend and conquer by virtue of rational calculation, that is, a way of thinking that allows for the measurement, manipulation, reproduction, and ultimately total control of natural as well as human existence. Along with this master narrative of instrumental rationalism appears its other, the native, uncivilized, underdeveloped, mythical peoples. With this differentiation one finds not a mutual uncanny sense of “each other,” an analogical relation of proximity in total exteriority, but rather a difference defined in terms of an asymmetrical relation of power and domination over others. As we will see now, this asymmetry is sustained by a specific sensibility grounded on the temporality that accompanies the ordering of existence under the coloniality of power and knowledge. This is where temporality becomes evident as an aesthetic disposition and sensibility that orients all determinations of self and beings, that is, in pre-rationally situating the ways and horizons within which experience and knowledge come to be understood and developed in the name of rationality and its production of senses of beings, life, and humanity.

The Coloniality of Time as the Aesthetic Sensibility of Domination The process through which the race difference is created is also accompanied by a series of epistemic mechanisms that operate in the attempt to dominate and or exterminate the indigenous cultures of the Americas. As one sees by even the

104 | Decolonial Turn and Dissemination of Philosophies briefest visit to such museums as the Archeological Museum in Mexico City, at the arrival of the conquerors the peoples of the Americas had fecund cultures that did not lack any of the development the Greeks had at an analogous point in their development: philosophical conceptions of the cosmos, of astronomy, of mathematics, music, poetry, written languages, and religion. All of these conceptions are most dramatically and directly expressed in the distinct sense of form in the arts and cultures that identify the various peoples of the Americas. The conquerors were not oblivious to this fact, and they responded in various ways, all of which contributed to the construction of the naturalized race difference, the idea of superior and inferior races, and the rationalist racist paradigm. As Quijano points out, it was not only a systematic destruction of books, religions, culture, and lives that distinguished the points of contact between indigenous peoples and conquerors. The conquerors also followed an economy of appropriation: they took whatever served their purpose and dismissed the rest.6 As Quijano sees it, the purpose of this appropriation was the control of resources, labor, and production worldwide; what was taken or appropriated was only what was fitting to the development of this economic world system. Furthermore, in order to secure labor and production, the conqueror trained the indigenous in the ways of the conquering culture.7 The Americas were not saved by Christianity but normalized for the sake of the development of a world-system of economic power and the knowledge necessary for its development. With this violent assimilation of culture by exclusion, with the physical destruction of peoples’ existences, the conqueror came to see himself as a power above all other beings. To say it in terms used by both Quijano and Dussel, the ego conquero preceded the ego cogito, and the practice of the conqueror established the place for the eventual self-recognition of the superior ego cogito.8 This system of exclusion and violence established a superiority that led the conqueror to see himself as naturally superior; this is the egocentrism or Eurocentrism that marks Western modern philosophy. But what is most striking about Quijano’s analysis at this point is that he finds that with this new consciousness of the Western mind appears a new sense of time and history. Together with the centrality of the European mind (ego cogito) appears an egocentrism that reduces rationality to a self-recognition that, even in its most critical moments, will affirm and remain committed to the centrality, to the single originality and determining power, of Western thought over all senses of being human and all ways of understanding existence. As Quijano explains, “In effect, all of the experiences, histories, resources, and cultural products ended up in one global cultural order revolving around European or Western hegemony.”9 Furthermore, with this egocentric moment a new temporality appears: “the Europeans generated a new temporal perspective of history and relocated colonized populations, along with their respective histories and cultures, in the past of a

“Coloniality of Power and Knowledge” | 105 historical trajectory whose culmination was European.”10 This sense of temporality means that history, as what we must learn and as that which holds our future, belongs to the Western nations and their economic and intellectual project. The march of Western history alone, in its conception of a world History, holds the development of humanity’s knowledge and the potential for human freedom. This concept of History is dependent on a specific line of temporality: the past is what has been left behind or what remains to be rewritten by the most advanced Western thought of the present; the future belongs to that Western present, as does the destiny of humanity. This sense of temporality becomes the horizon for world knowledge. Or, in other words, as we experience it today, this temporality becomes the organizing criterion taken to naturally be the ground of human consciousness; consciousness is its present knowledge (that which is acceptable and useful to the Western modern globalizing project) and the potential for the production of future knowledge on the basis of the present. This specific sense of temporality manifests itself in categories well known to Western intellectuals and their academies: Eastern-Western, primitive-civilized, magic–mythic-scientific, irrational-rational, and traditional-modern.11 In short, with the development of the coloniality of power and knowledge appears a sense of temporality that creates a certain disposition and through it provides the limits and horizons for all human knowledge. The experience of existence is now situated in the present as understood by the project of calculative production and manipulation prevalent in Western rationalism and its version of reason and the Enlightenment.12 Here the present of modern Western consciousness (ego cogito) becomes the axis of time and therefore the criterion of judgment. In other words, it is the knowledge of this specific time and consciousness that figures the limits and possibilities of all human understanding and existence. The time of this consciousness becomes a disposition, a sensibility, that situates thought and any possible human knowledge. This means that even before experience may count as phenomenon or knowledge, even before thought begins to be formulated, it will be put under the yoke of this single present. Invisibly, this temporality figures a sensibility that situates a priori all possible human experience and knowledge within a single epistemic frame of knowledge.13 Time, then, functions as a sensibility that gives direction and limits, as the horizon that will sustain and affirm the coloniality of power and knowledge. It unfolds as the coloniality of time that will orient Western modern philosophy and the Latin American appropriations of the modern project. This sense of temporality becomes so prevalent that even when Western thinkers recognize the limitations of the Western concept of history, they do so from their place in that ubiquitous timeline. For reasons of space I will simply outline some of the main configurations of the coloniality of time in three principal figures in the history of philosophy as understood by Westernized

106 | Decolonial Turn and Dissemination of Philosophies thought, leaving the association of them with other philosophers and movements in Latin America and the West up to the reader. As Quijano himself points out, the appearing of this temporality has been equated primarily not with the coloniality of power and knowledge but with the Enlightenment’s secularization of knowledge and the project of freedom of the French Revolution. During the Middle Ages, knowledge is marked by a return to the past; after the Enlightenment, knowledge may be newly acquired by reason.14 In terms of our discussion, this is the moment in which the coloniality of time takes explicit form in modern Western thought. From this point on the coloniality of time will appear in many configurations throughout the history of Western philosophy and philosophies grounded on it. At least I must mention three basic forms of it. In Kant the coloniality of time is explicit: time appears as the intuited time of rational consciousness, and as such time is the basic intuition that situates consciousness with respect to the configuration of empirical perceptions. Thus time underlies all cognitive possibilities and is the criterion and sensibility that frames all knowledge. Eventually this sensibility seems to submerge for Hegel, when time becomes the movement of history, entering the realm of particular forms of thought and of the singular.15 However, history is understood as the manifestation of the unfolding of the knowledge of the Western rational mind. Thus, the coloniality of time that arises from the coloniality of power and knowledge and from the egocentrism of Western modern thought remains unquestioned and operative at the center of all possible knowledge. In other words, the sensibility that frames the direction and horizon of the project becomes invisible and yet still operates as the limit and horizon of knowledge. Now singularities belong to the great unfolding of the history of spirit (the project of progress that dismisses and subsumes other cultures and histories and that relegates human lives to the past by virtue of its single-minded progress of spirit.) Lastly, time reappears as the now, the “event,” in the form of a present charged with the future of human and all other existence that depends on Western European and North American rationalism. This present will be emphasized in the work of deconstruction later on as well as in what today has come to be called “new materialism.”16 As we have seen, in his work Quijano shows that behind the colonization of the Americas and the development of Western rationalism in modernity from the fifteenth century to date one finds the coloniality of power and knowledge. At the physical level this occurs as military, economic, and social domination; at the conceptual level this occurs as the creation and perpetuation of systems of thought that perpetuate the dominating structures and justify them.17 Behind these levels lies the coloniality of time: an almost invisible sensibility, a pre-rational disposition and directionality that orients human reason toward the repetition of these structures of power and which situates the very limits and horizons

“Coloniality of Power and Knowledge” | 107 of conceptual knowledge and the attempts at a critique of the already active practices, orderings, and lineages that sustain power and its perpetuation. Given the way temporality is wedded to the project and limits of rational consciousness, temporality operates as a sensibility that situates thought practically a priori. At this point a project of a philosophy of liberation or of any philosophy that may think beyond the coloniality of power and knowledge seems impossible. No matter what the content of the thought, no matter how critical, its status and validity as thought/knowledge will be situated a priori by a sensibility that puts it under the judgment of the coloniality of power and knowledge. (We will see in chapter 10 the effects of this sensibility on Frantz Fanon’s attempts to give articulation to his distinct existence beyond the coloniality of power and knowledge.) Therefore, any philosophical critical project seems fated to repeat the inscription under this order. This is because the new categories developed will respond to a necessity situated with respect to the sense of temporality and sensibility that puts all configurations and affirmations of life under the coloniality of power and knowledge.18 It is precisely this temporality or sensibility that must be not only exposed but undone in order to gain an opening for a philosophy of liberation.

The Coloniality of Thought In light of the coloniality of power and knowledge appears a crucial question, not only for the philosophy of liberation but for any attempt to think from radical exteriority.19 What are the specific forms coloniality takes in modern philosophy?20 The relationship between coloniality—its sets of relations and modalities of knowledge—and modern Western philosophy must be made explicit if one aims for an accurate critique and seeks to find the limits of the attempt to think from radical exteriority. While it is not a given that philosophical knowledge is determined by economic and political interests as those of colonialism, it is the case that the project of a modern rational subjectivism and the deployment of its transcendental and instrumental knowledge seem to go hand in hand with colonialism, liberalism, neo-liberalism, and globalism. Even if one were to grant that unlike these movements philosophical thought does not seek by definition economic or political power as its primary aim, it is not of lesser importance to recognize how philosophical knowledge is never beyond issues of power. Conceptual knowledge in its articulations of senses of beings is always a source of power, and the configuration of practices and institutions that will sustain specific ideas are clearly instruments of power. At the same time, even this type of framing of the issue does not tell us how we may understand Western North American and European modern philosophy in relation to coloniality. The relationship between coloniality and modern Western philosophy concerns a set of dispositions and expectations operative in the very configuration of what one may call philosophical questioning. This set of expectations and prac-

108 | Decolonial Turn and Dissemination of Philosophies tices may be broken down into various elemental aspects. The first is the ontological attitude that all responds to one Being or totality. The second is the ontohistorical attitude that all philosophical determinations of beings respond to the single history of Western philosophy, which begins with the ancient Greeks and finds its apogee in modernity and its post-modern critics. As we have just seen, this historical model has serious implications for the understanding of temporality (fundamental to modern Western philosophy at least from Hegel on). As we just saw, the idea that all other histories and civilizations are behind the spearheading development of the West is sustained by the development of a new sense of time under the unfolding of coloniality in the Americas.21 A third aspect is the subjective rationalist attitude, which gives the meaning of all ways of being to the Western rational subject (ego cogito), a particular transcendental consciousness characterized by a universal objective rational knowledge that affects and comprehends all senses of beings while remaining untouched by that which it defines and names. This position has a corollary: the idea that all that is and has sense must correspond to the analysis and logic of reason and as such must be a scientific fact, analyzable, repeatable, and always subject to rational, argumentative explanation. This position inspires a scientific approach to the human sciences and hence underlies all interpretations of lives distinct from those understandable to logical instrumental reasoning. As we saw above, this is a position shared by Dussel’s philosophy as well as by Salazar Bondy. A fourth aspect of the relationship between coloniality and Western philosophy is the traditional phenomenological attitude, which holds that I may know only that which I see and that what I see may be taken as given to the “I” or a transcendental consciousness. This extends to meet the previous corollary in the shared form of taking all existence as available for the ego’s understanding, calculation, and manipulation.22 And, as a corollary to this, one may add the insistence on seeking something authentic and objectively knowable, such as, for example, the search for what is “Latin American” in the case of a thought from the southern cone. A fifth aspect is the appropriative attitude—the idea that all that is beyond the Western tradition is its other and as such is available as reason’s negativity, which means available for reason to determine its meaning, and ultimately its value. The other living being, the other culture, and their sense are held in question by Western modern reason. The contemporary tendency has been to replace the direct appropriative attitude with a more complex strategy, in which the others are required to undergo the loss of their identities for the sake of entering into the post-modern “open” philosophical discourse. In order to avoid misunderstandings I must indicate that these observations do not call for the abandonment of the history of ancient and modern Western philosophy, reason, or science; instead, they aim to make explicit certain attitudes or dispositions that trap and limit philosophical thought under the project

“Coloniality of Power and Knowledge” | 109 of modern Western philosophical instrumental rationalism and subjectivism.23 At the same time, as we have seen from the previous analyses, the issue is not that of the rejection of modernity. As we have found in Dussel’s work and in Quijano as well, the Western tradition being put into question is inseparable from the radical exteriority that questions it and exposes its limits. Therefore, this set of dispositions that sustain most of philosophy throughout the world today points to presuppositions that remain unquestioned by Westernized philosophers and often invisible to those seeking a decolonial turn. As we saw in the case of our discussion of Dussel’s thought, the point is to have clarity about these dispositions, which may allow us to challenge them both in others as well as in our thought. Moreover, this is not about what one says or which history one learns; these are essential elements of coloniality that must be challenged and undone. Philosophically speaking the critique goes to how and in what manner one raises questions. The issue is that of the epistemic boundaries and the logic that orients a philosopher’s discourse of liberation. Moreover, this is not limited to a critique of reasoning. Thought arises out of existential experiences that involve our bodies, memories (voluntary and involuntary), loss, desire, anxieties, fears, and preconscious projections of the limits and possibilities of desires. Given this fact, thinking from radical exteriority involves a decolonial turn that must also engage the pre-rational and pre-linguistic, the living movement in which concepts and orderings arise and with them subjects, intersubjectivity, institutions, and normalizing practices. If this occurs, thinking is always already exposed to an exteriority that sustains the sense of being in radical and total exteriority, not only with respect to Western thought but in terms of the conceptual and logical, epistemic and normative frameworks already operative. One more fundamental point must be underlined: the problem with the dispositions above becomes evident when one sees that the insights gained by a distinct group of people becomes inseparable from practices of power that made knowledge inseparable from the first. What was distinct knowledge and its encounter with other distinct knowledges turned into the assertion of one universal way of thinking and a line of progress defined by it. Indeed, universality was betrayed, and it will be part of what may be regained from radical exteriority through a decolonial turn. This will become clear in a section in chapter 7 in which I turn to the question of universality. At this point I have taken a leap ahead to the conclusions we will draw from the second part of Quijano’s analysis of temporality, in which we will begin to engage a sense of distinct existences in radical exteriority that will take us beyond the analysis of traditional philosophy. We will be reencountering, however, a path already open by the phenomenological analysis of Latin American temporality by Ernesto Mayz Vallenilla in chapter 2, yet this time from without the realm of the totality of Being that situated and limited Mayz Vallenilla’s phenomenology.

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Lo Desmesurado: Thinking in Light of Latin America’s Simultaneous Ana-Chronic Temporalities The issue of temporality appears again in Aníbal Quijano’s essay “Modernity, Identity, and Utopia in Latin America.”24 In this piece Quijano develops the issue of temporality with respect to Latin America by making two observations that may serve to displace the sense of temporality or the coloniality of time I have just discussed.

Latin American New Modernity beyond Instrumental Modernization With the dominant Western model of rationality that serves to dominate Latin America as well as many other lands and peoples comes the question of how to understand reason beyond its pernicious forms, how to appeal to reason without having to repeat the false dichotomy between the rational and the irrational and without having to define reason as the single development of an ego cogito that must naturally follow and expand the habit of its preceding historical form, the ego conquero (to use Dussel’s apt characterization of modern Western thought in its predatory forms). In “Modernity, Identity, and Utopia in Latin America” Quijano makes clear the original character of the Enlightenment, the role of Latin America in its origination, and the split that ends up reducing reason and the Enlightenment by leading them into a rationalist, predatory, instrumental way of thinking. As Quijano explains, the Enlightenment is marked by a shift in temporality that underlies the redirecting of the task of thinking and the understanding of the direction and origins of knowledge. In the Middle Ages, the church looks at its past in a return to the origins of humanity, with the marked nostalgia of a life lost that must be recovered.25 Knowledge is sustained by the promise of a return to past absolute knowledge. This era comes to an end with a radical reconfiguration of the sense of the universe. With the encounter with the Americas the past may not explain the future, and as a result a new sense of time, a new sensibility, comes to organize knowledge.26 In other words, the Copernican revolution first happens in the sublunary realm with the encounter of Europe with the Americas, an encounter that transforms the order of knowledge and the temporality that underlies it. The violent encounter between Europe and the Americas requires of the Europeans a new set of imperatives, namely, “to study, explain, doubt, discuss, and investigate all that exists and happens in the universe, and to modify ideas and images, and experiences correspondingly.”27 Secular knowledge takes its place over religious knowledge when the Americas appear as the new horizon of questions that demand secular answers, “all knowledge would owe its production and legitimacy to the employment of the characteristic aptitudes for making experiences common property, announcing discoveries, translating, and devel-

“Coloniality of Power and Knowledge” | 111 oping cognitive frameworks.”28 But this developments are not exclusive to the European continent. Instead, as Quijano shows, the beginning of the Enlightenment occurs simultaneously on both sides of the Atlantic. If one considers the characteristic traits of the Enlightenment—the interest in the scientific investigations of the universe and the resulting discoveries: the acceptance of the often radical intellectual risks implied in this behavior; the critique of existing social realities and the complete acceptance of the idea of change; the disposition to work reforms, against social prejudices, arbitrary power, despotism, and obscurantism—if these are the initial features of the movement of modernity, they are as documentable in colonial America as in Europe during the eighteenth century. . . . The intellectual and social movement of the Enlightenment . . . was produced and practices simultaneously in Europe and America. . . . All of this was felt even more profoundly in America than Europe during the eighteenth century, because its colonial situation reinforced despotism, arbitrariness, inequality, and obscurantism.29

Indeed, as Quijano goes on to point out, the developments of the Enlightenment took concrete political form in the Americas one century before they did in Europe.30 Then a metamorphosis occurs in modernity in Latin America. In short, the Americas do not complete the process of change from mercantile to capitalist society, and consequently the ideas of the Enlightenment in Latin America will remain without material mediation. This is due to the colonial dependency of the Americas, in the form of Spanish limitations of the economies of the colonies, and the collapse of Spanish power with the following relocation of power in Holland and then England. As a result, whereas in Europe the ideas of the Enlightenment become the mode of everyday life in society, in the Americas the ideals end up restricted to a subjective realm; they never enter the material reality of society. Thus, the ideals of the Enlightenment for a long time become in the Americas a matter of intellectual ideals and reasoning. “Intellectual could think with the tools of modernity while their society became less and less modern, less rational.”31 Yet this change and displacement is directly linked to an internal crisis in the modern European project. From the outset European Enlightenment has an internal dualism. On the one hand it upholds the historical ideals of freedom, equality, and brotherhood; on the other hand, it understands reasoning in instrumental terms, where reason is equated with ratio, with calculation, manipulation, and production, and as such seen as a mechanism of power and domination. But by the nineteenth century the project of the Enlightenment is overtaken by instrumental reasoning: The imposition of English hegemony, linked as it was to the spectacular expansion of British industrial capitalism, consolidated the hegemony of the tendencies in the movement of the Enlightenment that conceived of reason primarily in instrumental terms. The association between reason and liberation was occluded. Henceforth, modernity would be seen almost exclusively through the crooked mirror of domination.32

112 | Decolonial Turn and Dissemination of Philosophies With this turn, the age of “modernization,” in contrast with modernity, has begun. And this modernization will be thereafter spread throughout the dominated peoples living under the Western world hegemony in its various forms, from colonialism to North American expansionism, the Pax Americana after World War II, and today’s globalism. With this analysis Quijano manages to recognize a series of fundamental differences in modernity and the project of the Enlightenment, which may help to see the possibility of other ways of thinking beyond modernization, ways of thinking that do not force us to chose between the rational and the irrational, the civilized and the mythical. Thanks to Quijano’s analysis we have the possibility of turning to reason in order to think modernity in other registers, namely, out of the Latin American situation. Moreover, the analysis shows that it is out of a transformation in sensibility (in the sense of temporality) that the Enlightenment arises out of the violent encounter of Europe and the Americas. As we will see now, it will be the question of temporality as a distinct sensibility that will situate the project of modernity beyond European modernization. Modernity in Latin America has two basic elements. One is the metamorphosis of modernity in Latin America that happens with the displacement of the historical and humanistic ideals in the absence of their social material mediation or concretization. The other is the domination of instrumental reason as the only solution for the materialization of any project of equality and democracy in Latin America. This stems from the coloniality of power and knowledge that with its perverse forms of rationalism permeates structures of domination, including the real socialism that attempts liberation through material instrumental thinking akin to that of dominant instrumental reasoning.33 The failure to bring modern rationality to concretion is also related to the perpetuation of Latin American dependency under European and North American domination.34 These two elements disclose the basis for a dualistic Latin American subjectivity that takes the philosophical form of the question of identity as the guiding question for Latin American thought. From Bolívar’s “Letter from Jamaica” on, this question seems to distinguish Latin American philosophy (to paraphrase, we Latin Americans are neither indigenous nor Europeans but something in between, since we uphold the European ideals of freedom and equality over indigenous culture while having to fight against the European for the sake of being recognized as Americans). As Quijano sees it, this duality is not a matter of being moderns or not but of a slowed modernity that remains Latin American. The ideals of the Enlightenment are not naturally and necessarily continuous with instrumental reasoning. We do not have to uphold modernity over, against, and as an imposition to the native, thus abandoning the modern humanist ideals of freedom, equality, and brotherhood. On the contrary, in Latin America we find a subjectivity that expresses the displaced ideals of modernity in other forms. Quijano gives the ex-

“Coloniality of Power and Knowledge” | 113 ample of the Peruvian thinker José Carlos Mariátegui, whose thought does not copy European Marxism but rather occurs out of an originary dualism between being a Marxist and not being a Marxist by affirming his belief in God. As Quijano points out, it is this dual subjective consciousness that differentiates Mariátegui from other thinkers of his time.35 Mariátegui exhibits a dualism that “derives from the rich, varied, and dense condition of the elements that nourish this subjectivity, whose open contradiction continues to fuse together new meanings and consistencies that articulate themselves in a new and different structure of intersubjective relations.”36 In short, in Latin America one finds other forms of reasoning that move beyond European and North American modernization and its rationalism. Quijano finds other paths for reason in the way modernization collapses under the pressure of Indian and African cultures, given the particular evidence and urgency of the failures of modernization with respect to those peoples. At such moments “the basic elements of our universal subjectivity become original again.”37 Quijano concludes, “With this resistance, a new utopia is beginning to be formed, a new historical meaning, a proposal of an alternative rationality.”38 One should be clear from the outset that Quijano’s argument for a utopian Latin American modernity is not about a promise beyond the present but may clearly be situated in relation to such realities as the struggle of the Zapatista movement as well as the transformations in countries like Bolivia under Evo Morales. And it must also be seen in light of the struggles and mistreatment of the Araucanos in the south of Chile as well as in terms of the struggles of the indigenous and Afro-Caribbean peoples throughout the Americas. This is a utopian project in that it situates political thought in its concrete historical context, rather than using instrumental projections as if the lives of peoples were a matter of quantitative problem solving or depended solely on creating and renovating normative structures. Utopic thinking arises from life: it occurs when two cultural heritages begin to coexist in Latin American experience. What is involved in this is a way of rearticulating two cultural heritages: from the original Andean rationality, a sense of reciprocity and solidarity; from the original modern rationality, when rationality was still associated with social liberation, a sense of individual liberty and of democracy as a collective decision-making process founded in the free choice of its constituent individuals.39

In short this is a political thought that “overcomes the duality between the private and the public, the question of the private versus the state.”40 Unlike instrumental capitalism, in Latin America one finds a double political heritage that may offer new articulations to the project of modernity by affirming both “the happiness of collective solidarity” along with “the adventure of complete individual self-fulfillment.”41 Here one finds a political reality that may well match Dussel’s idea of a politics of the people both as the source of political power to

114 | Decolonial Turn and Dissemination of Philosophies which the state serves and in the raising of individual consciousness that choses to participate in that process of democracy as individual actors (thus forming an ideological hegemony in Gramsci’s sense). As we will see now, this new modernity and political utopia is itself predicated on aesthetic experience, which ultimately means a transformation of the concept of temporality.

Pyramidal Time, or beyond the Coloniality of Time of Western Modernity Quijano’s claim to a Latin American utopian modernity is based on the basic dualism one finds in Latin American identity. This dualism is ultimately a matter of a distinct difference in aesthetic consciousness or sensibility. Quijano writes, “One of the most insistent expressions of the tensile character of Latin American subjectivity is a permanent note of dualism in our intellectual manner, our sensibility, our imaginary.”42 One finds in this intellectual manner, sensibility, and distinct imaginary a shift in disposition in the very directionality of thought and its horizons through a reinterpretation of temporality away from the lineal Western (European and North American) model that underlies instrumental reasoning and its hegemonic project of progress. One of the many meanings that is beginning to form Latin American identity is that here, because of the ‘metamorphosis’ of our modernity, the relationship between history and time is completely different than in Europe or the United States. In Latin America what is a sequence in other countries is simultaneity. It is also a sequence. But in the first place, it is a simultaneity.43

In Latin America temporality is marked by the overlapping of orderings or historical periods supposedly already left behind, all actively participating in the configuration of concrete Latin American realities. Quijano’s example concerning economy in his essay helps to see how simultaneity works in Latin America. What in Europe is seen as stages left behind in a system that develops into capitalism in Latin America appears as various vertical levels of exchange and power all at work simultaneously. To say it in Marxist-Hegelian terms, the model of historical Aufhebung does not work for Latin America; no form is transformed into another, but rather many forms remain active and non-dialectically at play without possible resolution into one form of capital production. We are speaking of a “pyramidal” sense of time that is the expression of simultaneous systems of power. As Quijano writes, “It is a question of a different history of time, and of a time different from history.”44 In other words, in Latin American existence one finds a directionality and disposition toward all senses of beings that is not compatible with or reducible to the coloniality of time. If European–North American temporality expresses the ordering of production under instrumental reason, Latin American temporality expresses the multiple directionality of a time-space in

“Coloniality of Power and Knowledge” | 115 which single order is not possible because of a simultaneity that sustains concrete and contradictory polyvalences. Latin America may participate in the single history line of Western thought, but it does so by remaining excessive to it. The simultaneity of time comes from a simultaneity of traditions. In turn such diversified and diversifying traditions in their overlappings configure unbridled realities. These realities find their direction and disposition toward the creation of concepts and meaning out of a sensibility oriented by simultaneity.

Improper Times: Of Ana-Chronic Simultaneity and Disseminations The dense structure of temporalities in Latin America occurs as what I would call ana-chronic and asymmetric temporality.45 This is an overlapping of histories that by virtue of the overlapping of lineages decenter and ultimately disseminate any possible idea of an essential or ontologically single origin to which lives must answer. In other words, what occurs is an overlapping or encroaching of temporalities or orderings of power and knowledge, which configure an ana-chronic time-space that is always already exposed to otherness—hence the “ana.” Here we find the temporal sensibility that underlies Dussel’s articulation of being human as being in an ana-logical situation, a human proximity in total exteriority.46 We have reached at this point the aesthetic aspect we had encountered in the previous discussion of philosophy of liberation, as we have come to a sense of time other than that of Western linear history, another disposition through which something like the senses of ourselves, reason, and political and ethical worlds may be understood. Given these ana-chronic sensibilities one may move beyond Quijano, since identity can no longer be seen as a matter of a single historical situation. When understood in light of the simultaneity of times, history loses its claim to lineages that may singly orient and perpetuate certain characteristics. Rather, from the simultaneity of people’s lives dissemination occurs, and history is transformed into a fecund lived time-space of concrete practices and orderings that require specific response to their distinct or singular manifestations. Indeed, in terms of the “simultaneity” that Quijano affirms there is not even a number of different histories, each coherent to its single lineage, from which something like an historical identity may be drawn. This is why Quijano himself must emphasize that in recognizing simultaneity he is not calling for a return to native lineages. “No one should think that I am proposing the return to Andean communalism or to the systems of reciprocity of the ancient agrarian societies of our continent. Neither will they return, nor would they be able to satisfy the complex needs of contemporary society.”47 Instead, as we have already pointed out above, in this pyramidal temporality the lineages or systems of power and knowledge will more often than not converge, encroach on each other, and ultimately occur as a timespace in which onto-theological identities are exposed, put into question, and

116 | Decolonial Turn and Dissemination of Philosophies transformed. This will occur in a dynamic movement vital and unlike Western static forms with lineal historical development and a singular economic system of power (economic, military) and knowledge. As Quijano explains with respect to the concrete reality of certain Latin American societies: What I propose is what Arguedas shows: that in the very center of Latin American cities, the masses of the dominated are building new social practices founded on reciprocity, on assumptions of equality, on collective solidarity, and at the same time on the freedom of individual choice and on a democracy of collectively made decisions, against all external impositions.48

Here, what remains internal and opposed to external impositions is not a history but the concrete multiplicity of orderings that allows for other ways of thinking, ways of interpreting experience possible because of the actors’ attunement or sensibility with respect to their dynamic situations. If once “history” was the term for such a call to the concrete lives of the Americas, we may now turn toward a more fecund expression found in the distinct and singular configurations of lives and senses of beings that constitute the being in radical exteriority that is Latin American existence. To say it in terms of Quijano’s utopic conclusion, the simultaneity of individual and state is possible because neither is ever a single lineage that remains to be defended or overcome. The temporality one finds in Latin America occurs as a fracturing of essentialist conceptions of existence and as such, in its dynamic movement, figures the place of birth and death of senses of being human and of the concepts that accompany the modern project of the Enlightenment in its broadest form, namely a liberty, fraternity and equality in light of other modernities and ways of thinking, such as those of Latin America. Anachronic Sensibility and Aesthetic Experience As I have already mentioned above, at this point one may return to the sensibility fundamental to Dussel’s sense of a philosophy of liberation and recognize in the simultaneity of temporalities in Latin American concrete lives the proximity in exteriority, that is, the sense of radical exteriority behind the ArgentineMexican philosopher’s thought. As we have seen, this sensibility is occluded by the temporality that sustains the coloniality of power and knowledge, a sensibility that limits our sense of possibilities with respect to our humanity, as it recognizes one single historical development, a single lineage founded on the exclusion of all distinctness and simultaneity, under the single light of individualistic rational calculation as the foundation of any possible society and sense of subjectivity. Now, having recognized the simultaneity of temporalities prevalent in Latin American concrete lives, we may turn to that ana-chronic sensibility in order to engage those fecund and dense lives and to begin to think a politics and ethics of

“Coloniality of Power and Knowledge” | 117 liberation. Quijano at this point turns to aesthetic experience, in the form of Latin American literature. Speaking of the simultaneity of orderings in the Latin American time-space, and of the sense of open, encroaching times that orients it, Quijano writes, For many of us, this was the most genuine meaning of our search and confusion during the period of the agitated debates over dependency theory. It is also true, however, that we were able to get at the question of our identity only intermittently. It was no accident that it was not a sociologist but a novelist, Gabriel Garcia Márquez, who by good fortune or coincidence, found the road to this revelation, for which he won the Nobel Prize. For by what mode, if not the aesthetic-mythic, can an account be given of the simultaneity of all historical times in the same time. And what but mythic time can be this time of all times? Paradoxically, this strange way of revealing the untranslatable identity of a history proves to be a kind of rationality, which makes the specificity of that universe intelligible.49

In closing his discussion of pyramidal temporalities in Latin America, Quijano points to Garcia Márquez, to Alejo Carpentier, and to Arguedas. This is because it falls to them, and not the philosophers or human scientists, to write and give articulation to this distinct temporality. It is they who write out of the radical sensibility of ana-chronic, simultaneous temporalities. They are able to think beyond philosophy because they think with and give articulation to the concrete overlapping, encroaching, and disseminating encounters that compose Latin American realities. In doing so they are unlike a philosophy that seeks to liberate itself in the name of history, thus repeating the European and North American lineages and sensibilities that are sustained by and are the expression of the coloniality of knowledge. But in Latin America one finds a further step. From such interruptions, from the silence of the excluded and those lives considered nothing, expendable, arise new ways of thinking. Quijano turns in particular to the works of the Peruvian José María Arguedas.50 As Quijano explains, Arguedas’s novels effect two changes in the way one thinks one’s reality in Latin America. First of all, at the linguistic level Arguedas enacts a linguistic subversion by introducing Quechua into Spanish.51 Quechua exercises a transformative effect on everyday life by interacting with the syntax and semantics of Spanish. This results in the creation of a new literary language, which, if one takes into consideration the way language situates existence, amounts to a new opening for the articulation of the excluded lives.52 Second, this transformation sustains a change in the content of the stories. Arguedas’s stories are about the indigenous and their lives as part of Latin American reality. He writes within the historical frame of the coloniality of power and knowledge and yet from the situation of the subaltern. The result is a reconfiguration of cultural horizons, and the destruction of the coloniality of history.53 Here it is not a matter of creating anew normative frames for the ac-

118 | Decolonial Turn and Dissemination of Philosophies ceptance of the indigenous or of accepting the indigenous as a different group in a pluralistic way. The change happens when, out of the radical interruption of the operative coloniality of power and knowledge by the subaltern, the excluded and silenced lives return to articulate themselves. Moreover, in doing so those lives in their concrete expression put into question and undo the sovereign exception, its metaphysics, language, politics, and instrumental normative rationalism. The mentioned writers, but also Borges, Cortázar, Bolaño, Juan José Saer, Luis Sepúlveda, Rigoberta Menchú, Gloria Anzaldúa, and so many others, expose us to the ana-chronic existence of a humanity whose sensibility occurs as a being exposed—in intimate proximity in total exteriority—to the dense experiences of being human and to the challenges and unfathomable possibilities that such open, articulate lives brings to us today. Moreover, I must at least emphasize in passing that I believe that one falls short of the fecundity of Latin American experience if only literature—not the popular oral traditions and songs that carry the memories and practices of the Americas in their indigenous, Afro-Caribbean, Easter European, Muslim, and Jewish aspects—is made the center of the unfolding articulation of temporal simultaneities.54 One of the most accurate expressions for these disseminating living events is the one Garcia Márquez gives to Latin America in his Nobel Prize speech of 1982, when he calls Latin American reality “una realidad desmesurada,” that is, an unbridled reality, beyond measure. As Garcia Márquez explains to the academy, the prize he receives is due to a reality and sensibility that remains beyond the sense of reality of European– North American instrumental temporal consciousness. What makes this reality desmesurada is precisely its shattering of the traditional concept of time that sustains the narrative of a single human history shaped by the development of rationalism in the Western world. The prize, then, would remind us of a forgotten story, the moment of the violent encounter in which Europeans and natives are translated into a history that insists in writing itself as the boundary of reality, although this reality is always already surpassed by the concrete simultaneity of times. The Nobel Prize exposes European and North American narratives to their own limits and to the possibility of other modernities as it brings to our awareness the fact that today the unbridled Latin American reality is not only a Latin American fact but a fundamental element in the project of a modernity beyond borders and undisturbed, self-unfolding lineages and traditions. Yet if this is the case, we are left with questions that bring the philosophy of liberation and the projects of decoloniality to face their limits and in doing so move them toward other possibilities. To what extent are the philosophy of liberation and the theories of coloniality and decoloniality dependent on the concepts of history and natural/historical temporality we have seen to belong to the West? What will be their paths in light of the ana-chronic sensibility we have encountered at the heart of Latin American existence and the call for thinking out of those distinct

“Coloniality of Power and Knowledge” | 119 and fecund lives? We began to take up the first question in our discussion of Dussel’s thought in the previous chapter and will go on to develop the issue further in the next. The question of new paths will occupy the various chapters that form the last section of this book.

6

Remaining with the Decolonial Turn Race and the Limits of the Social-Political Historical Critique in Latin American Thought Ontology—once it is finally admitted as leaving existence by the wayside— does not permit us to understand the being of the black man. —Frantz Fanon To think in the interstices of the Modern project’s crisis, such is the task of a critical ontology of the present. —Santiago Castro-Gómez Philosophy has always insisted upon this: thinking its other. . . . To insist upon thinking its other: its proper other, the proper of its other, an other proper? In thinking it as such, in recognizing it, one misses it. One reappropriates it for oneself, one disposes of it, one misses it, or rather one misses (the) missing (of) it, which as concerns the other, always amounts to the same. —Jacques Derrida

In this chapter I revisit Quijano’s analysis critically, in order to underline some of the difficulties that come with his historical materialist critique of Western modernity, difficulties that I believe ultimately may undermine the very attempt to the decolonization of consciousness and thought that his analysis intends. My aim is to point toward the possibility for another way of thinking that may contribute to the decoloniality of thought and to the unfolding of philosophies today. This way of thinking takes its departure from a Latin American experience that no longer fits the attempts to establish a place for Latin America within the scope of Western modern rationalism and its self-criticism. As I conclude, Latin America marks a spacing, a difference, that is neither outside nor inside modern Western rationalism and that cannot be understood as the negativity that calls for a new rationalist theory of dialectical or historical materialist critique. This is because Latin America ultimately plays out the slipping, the undoing, of Western modern thought in concrete terms by virtue of its inoperative and interruptive play within Western modernity, history, and the Western project of human freedom under the infinite production of capital.1 This does not mean that the ques-

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Remaining with the Decolonial Turn | 121 tion of human freedom must be abandoned; on the contrary, the question remains to be thought in light of distinct and radical exteriority (in this case, Latin America’s), at the limit of its doing and undoing throughout modernity.

A Decolonial Question In Black Skin White Masks Fanon writes: “Ontology—once it is finally admitted as leaving existence by the wayside—does not permit us to understand the being of the black man.”2 Fanon’s statement raises a question beyond its very confines. If Western philosophy or ontology does not permit us to understand the being of the black or colored person, then what would suggest that seeking “the being of the colored person” would be the path toward the articulation of that existence? How is the being of the colored person conceived if not from the Western philosophical tradition, both as Fanon writes the statement and as one comes to it? Indeed, the statement may easily fold into a single totality. This happens as soon as one turns to the ideals of Western modern philosophy, to its single historical narrative and time line, to its project of a single progress of humanity through instrumental rationalism, and to the human sciences in order to reclaim being, and more specifically the human being, “l’homme” that Fanon seeks in Black Skin White Masks. Is the human one seeks to claim not already contextualized as “fact” and rational subject and therefore under the agenda of the Western project of progress and freedom? In other words (now crossing, betraying the geopolitical divide), when Western thought’s rationalism is put into question, should not the subjectivity of the colored person also be put into question? If one does not address these questions, if one does not take up the risk in Fanon’s statement, his very words may become almost a tautology from being to being, as one moves back into the totalizing, exclusive inclusion one attempts to overcome by virtue of remaining under the reasoning that sustains the exclusion. Moreover, this tautology may not be saved by a mere shifting of registers from philosophy as the expression of Western colonialist power over the other’s existence to philosophy seen from a geopolitical perspective that recognizes differences. There will be no liberation if the grounds for the recognition of difference are the very same principles and the very same rationalist instrumental materialism which underlie and define the operation of Western philosophy as colonizing power. In the following discussion I want to show that Fanon’s question concerns a limit (always arising beyond Western thought), a delimitation of existence that is risked and put at risk without recourse to the project or operation of that which situates it. This is a spacing that remains to be engaged, and in that engagement undergone and withstood as it is thought in its concrete temporalizing movement. In other words, to critique Western thought and undo the coloniality of power and knowledge from the situation of the colonized is not merely to recognize the subjectivity, agency, and powerknowledge potential for the progress of those peoples and cultures excluded and

122 | Decolonial Turn and Dissemination of Philosophies oppressed under the Western modern tradition. What must not remain intact are the concepts I have just mentioned. And this means that the very epistemic structures that sustain these concepts, as well as the dispositions and the subconscious expectations constituted by practices of bodies and imaginaries that project the very horizons of existences, must be undone. But this also means putting into question the very issue of coloniality and philosophical thought, particularly with respect to the perpetuation of the manner and disposition, the expectations and drives, that underlie Western modernity and colonialism and that may be repeated by the very critique that attempts to dismantle them.

Latin America and the Race Paradox In The Souls of Black Folk (1903) W. E. B. Du Bois introduces the phrase “the color line” in order to refer to the racism that separates white from colored races: “The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line—the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea.”3 As he sees it, this specific separation, this line on the sand, defines the difference that for the most part seems to organize the question of race in North America and Europe, particularly with respect to colonialism in the forms of the so-called conquest of the Americas, of the development of slavery, and of imperialist colonialism. But the color line also refers to the self-recognition of the colonialist and imperialist powers as the most advanced center and point of reference for our understanding of the advancement of humanity and its possible freedom throughout history against its barbaric and exotic other. This view is possible since it is the modern Western subject that seems to hold the destiny of humanity in its historical progress, rational objectivity, and technological development. However, when one looks at this seemingly natural division between white and colored by referring to “race,” a puzzling experience occurs: much like in the case of Saint Augustine, who seemed to know time until he had to explain it, when one has to give a place and definition of race, the term begins to slip. It is subject to biological claims. It is also identified with family, nationality, religion, ethnicity, culture, and history, with social-political reality, with economic issues, and with the construction of imaginaries that situate others, as Edward Said’s Orientalism shows.4 In Black Skin White Masks Frantz Fanon gives a psychiatric diagnosis of the race division as a shared existential neurosis of the colonizer and the colonized, which takes place both at a psychological as well as at an epidermic level.5 In short, race seems to touch every level of our being, and yet it does not have a specific place or definition. The paradoxical status and density of the issue only becomes more evident when one considers race as it occurs in Latin America. As Leopoldo Zea indicates in “Negritude and Indigenism,” for Latin America the issue is not that of a black people over and against whites but one of “mestizaje.” It is the issue of the libera-

Remaining with the Decolonial Turn | 123 tion of a mixed people who are gathered under the name “Latin Americans.”6 This is an observation that holds from Vasconcelo’s The Cosmic Race to such late intellectuals as Roberto Fernándes-Retamar, and it in fact already finds precedents in the writings of Azara in 1781.7 If in North America and even Europe the line has been kept clean for the most part, this was not the case in Latin America. In North America the indigenous peoples were slaughtered and erased from their lands, and the negro and later Asian peoples appeared as slaves in chains. These two ways of encountering exteriority in the forming of the white North American mind secured that the color line would be visible and that race would seem a natural fact. In Europe one may think back to 1492, when the Arabs and Jews were expelled from Al’Andalus in the Iberian Peninsula. In such a story no one would doubt the distinct difference between the white European mind and the colored other. In contrast, in Latin America the conquistadors immediately began to mix with indigenous women. While they perpetrated terrible genocides and destroyed indigenous lives and cultures, at the same time they gave rise to those Latin Americans that Simón Bolívar so well described in his “Letter to Jamaica” as a people neither European nor indigenous but in between and at war with both. As Africans, Iberians, and Amerindians mixed, and as their children mixed, there appeared in Latin America mestizos, mulatos, criollos, castizos, cholos, and Zambos, to name but a few.8 This mixing was only more liberal in Brazil, where the Portuguese did not even concern themselves much with making the mixing legal under the eyes of the Lord. The conquest of Brazil, unlike that of the Spanish Americas, did not involve the education of the indigenous people but rather the establishing of ports for the Atlantic trade, and the mixing happened without a claim to the indoctrination or salvation of the native peoples. In short, in Latin America the issue of race is not that of a distinct color line; rather, it indicates a space of existence of a people who are colonial subjects but not directly separated into white and colored races. Indeed, as Roberto Fernández Retamar reminds us in his famous essay on Latin American identity titled Caliban, it was this lack of white and indigenous purity that brought José Martí, one of the great liberators of the Americas, to speak of “our mestizo America.” With his great humanism, Martí responded to Sarmiento’s racist dualism between the civilized Westerners and the barbaric indios and gauchos (in Civilization and Barbarism) by saying that in Latin America “There can be no racial animosity, because there are no races. . . . The soul equal and eternal, emanates from bodies of various shapes and colors. Whoever foments and spreads antagonism and hate between the races, sins against humanity.”9 The issue of race as a distinct color line becomes even more complicated when one considers the famous break between Frantz Fanon and the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre. In his introduction to Orphée noir (1948)—the first anthology of African poets who wrote in French to appear in France—Sartre recognizes

124 | Decolonial Turn and Dissemination of Philosophies the appearance of the negro and negritude as a force dialectically opposed to the white colonialist: a kind of “anti-racist racism” (racisme antiraciste).10 Following his own diagnosis, Fanon replied that this image of resistance was ultimately but a continuation of Western supremacy that now recognized in the negritude movement a moment in the development of European Marxist history. Fanon’s full critique of Sartre’s position in Black Skin White Masks ultimately figures a call for moving beyond the dialectic of the white mastermind and the barbarian, exotic colored other, and beyond the historical element of Hegelian dialectics that sustain such idea.11 The call for an autonomous way of articulating identity beyond the color line appears as much within negritude movements as within indigenous movements in Latin America. For example, José Carlos Mariátegui (one of the most brilliant political philosophers of the twentieth century, with a mind close to Gramsci’s), who spoke out of indigenous experiences in the Americas, states in his famous “The Indian Problem”: “the problem of the Indian is the problem of land ownership and not of ethnicity.”12 In looking at the idea of race as the natural color line, the Latin America context shows that those very thinkers who recognize colonialism’s violence and oppressive power, those who are most distinctly conscious of the wretched of the colonialist earth and who bear their radical exteriority in word and flesh, remain only tenuously within the idea of a possible clean and natural color line as Du Bois would have it.13 But if not in terms of this black and white dialectic presented by Du Bois, how can one understand the racism, the violent separation, expropriation, and destruction that accompanies the radical mixings between Europeans, indigenous, and negroes in Latin America? This question brings together three issues that seem to me inseparable for Latin American thought: race, coloniality, and identity, as the ever-present question of the distinct articulation of that mixture of identities clumsily bundled up under the awkward term “Latin America.”14 Here, in contrast to Du Bois’ call for race as a self-recognition through blood, race appears as a possible area of contestation of the very concepts and epistemic structures that situate it as a biological and natural fact.15 In order to engage the concept of race as such an area of contestation and in its direct connection with Western modern thought, we may now return briefly to Aníbal Quijano’s analysis of the development of race along the development of the coloniality of power and knowledge that occurs with the colonization of the Americas in the sixteenth century. In doing so I will be referring to some of the main conclusions from the previous chapter.

Race and Philosophy: In Light of the Coloniality of Thought As we saw in the previous chapter, in his analysis Quijano follows a strict Marxist materialist approach, through which he is able to trace historically the construction of race and simultaneously with it the placement of the ego cogito or the ra-

Remaining with the Decolonial Turn | 125 tionalist subject at the center of human knowledge and existence. 16 Such construction and placement become the very symbol and content of Western modern rationalism and of Western philosophy. Briefly, Quijano agrees with such critics of Western modernity as Immanuel Wallerstein and Enrique Dussel, who understand Western modernity as the result of a process that occurs with the colonization of the Americas and the Atlantic trade in the sixteenth century.17 This process of violence, invasion, appropriation, and exclusion results in the placement of central European culture at the center of the world.18 It happens as the Americas become the other of the emerging white European power by virtue of the construction of a racial difference between the colonizer and the colonized. In terms of the construction of race, ultimately the point is that the colonizer distinguishes himself from the colonized by claiming natural superiority. This occurs as a hierarchy is established that recognizes those native to the Americas as naturally inferior to the colonizer. As we saw in chapter 5, superiority is established by a series of mechanisms through which the colonizer allocates the colonized into a system of power and knowledge developed materially. This occurs through the construction of cities that place the colonized and the conqueror in different spaces, through the assignation of jobs to each group, and through the corresponding presence or absence of wages (managers, servants, slaves, indigenous peoples handed over with the encomiendas).19 From this division of labor follows the development of various social identities. At the same time each job is naturally accompanied by the need for specific training, and the training allows for the identification of specific kinds of natural intelligence in each group. Through this process is invented a being inferior in intelligence to the white European conqueror, and, along with it, a superior white consciousness begins to appear. At this point one finds that a difference has been established between white and colored, the difference that will serve to distinguish in a naturalized manner the two races. From this differentiation will follow the separation of the world into other races, which are all ultimately considered inferior to the white European.20 This occurs as the system of power and knowledge developed in the Americas is eventually imported to the rest of the world in the form of colonialism. The unfolding of the coloniality of power and knowledge is also accompanied by a series of epistemic mechanisms that operate in the attempt to dominate or exterminate the indigenous cultures of the Americas. At the time of the arrival of the conquistadors, the indigenous peoples of the Americas had well-developed philosophical conceptions of the cosmos, astronomy, mathematics, music, poetry, written languages, and religion. The conquerors were not oblivious to this fact and responded in various ways, which contributed to the construction of the naturalized race difference and the idea of a superior race and inferior races. As Quijano points out, this entailed a systematic destruction of books, religions,

126 | Decolonial Turn and Dissemination of Philosophies culture, and lives that distinguished the points of contact between indigenous peoples and conquerors. The conquerors took whatever served their purpose and dismissed the rest.21 This appropriation had as its aim the control of resources, labor, and production worldwide; what was thought valuable, what was taken or appropriated, was only what was fitting to the development of the Western economic world system. Furthermore, in order to secure labor and production, the conqueror trained the indigenous in the ways of the conquering culture.22 As the Argentine philosopher and feminist María Lugones rightly points out, the Americas were not saved by Christianity but normalized for the sake of the development of a world system of economic power and the knowledge necessary for its development.23 With this violent assimilation of culture by exclusion, with the physical destruction of people’s existences, the conqueror came to see himself as a power above all other races and his violence as justified by the weakness, epistemic deficiency, and, ultimately, physical availability of all other races. As we saw in the previous chapter, this racist system of power and knowledge operates under a particular time line. The myth of a single human history that has at the apogee Western thought,24 and the epistemic prejudice that accompanies it and characterizes all other ways of knowledge as behind or on the way to becoming like Western knowledge, are themselves racist operations based on—and used in order to perpetuate—the coloniality of power and knowledge to date.25 In looking at the development of the racial difference as traced by Quijano, one finds two points of possible critical engagement with Western modern philosophy. One is the need for a critique of Western consciousness as situated by the temporality of a rationalist instrumental project and delimitation of thought. This I take to be a critique that begins from Heidegger and works through deconstruction in Western philosophy. The other position would be exterior to this Western project—namely, a thinking from those lives, cultures, and histories that have been discarded for the last five hundred years. My concern here is always with the latter, as the path to a decolonial thinking. But here appears a profound difficulty: how would one think in light of discarded consciousness if not out of a consciousness determined by the time line and sense of history that sustain the Western modern rationalist instrumental project? In order to understand this question and its problematic implications better, I turn now back to Quijano’s analysis. In doing so I will be playing out some of the delimiting moments in Quijano’s analysis in order to see the extent to which the very opening accomplished by his analysis is framed by the coloniality of time I have been discussing.

To Philosophize a Corps Perdu Quijano’s analysis shows that by virtue of the epistemic prejudice and its history or time line, Western philosophy arises through a racist process, where the non-

Remaining with the Decolonial Turn | 127 Western is used by Western instrumental rationalism and at the same time dismissed culturally and as a possible source of philosophical insight or knowledge. Furthermore, as we have just seen, in his positive account, Quijano recognizes another sense of time and history captured by the “mythical” writing of Garcia Márquez and concretely configured by a utopian rationalism that is founded in a new intersubjectivity.26 The distinct concrete temporality of Latin American experience figures a point of progress in the project of humanity that goes beyond Western modern instrumentalism. However clear and historically and socio-politically accurate the analysis, Quijano’s discussion does not have a philosophical effect yet. Both his negative and positive critiques are grounded on ideas that belong to the very project he wants to challenge and undo. His discussion is based on a rationalist historical materialism (not a utopian humanism), and the expectation that leads it is that of a progress that occurs out of history. There is, then, in Quijano a change without a fundamental transformation, since the new configurations occur by constructing a new rationalism, modernity, and history. This new modernity still corresponds to ideas of progress and history, in the form of a dialectic movement of material, historical progress. In his analysis the excluded and exploited in their very being are always the product of the ego conquero and therefore are ultimately situated by the Western tradition as its other. Where this may be fitting in the sense of power and knowledge, the being of those distinct lives and cultures is not the product of (genitive) Western modernity tout court. As a result of this adjudication of difference to the system of power and knowledge that sustains the development of Western European and later North American modernity, the only path beyond racism is through recognizing a new movement in history and production. The progress that excludes must become a progress that liberates, a utopic progress, as the engine of dialectic history goes on. What is not put into question is the concept of progress and the historical materialism that is but an ever-self-producing manifestation of Western instrumental rationalism. Quijano’s critique recognizes Western history as the origin of alterity and thereby situates all questions of alterity under that historical development. The indigenous, the afro-Caribbean, the Islamic, the Chinese are but creations of the Western historical development and therefore may only be critiqued through Western history. Every change and every possible unfolding must arise from and therefore pass by necessity through the filter or engine of rationalist historical progress and dialectic production. The problem is that such an analysis does not leave room for other possible configurations of identities, for transformations, for dialogues beyond the constraints of the Western modern project of progress and the epistemic and existential requirements and limitations such a project imposes on all senses of being. If one thinks of the traditional north-south dependency, in following Quijano’s analysis any liberating thought will have to repeat the jour-

128 | Decolonial Turn and Dissemination of Philosophies ney north and thus will have to pass through a transformation by the northern epistemic apparatus, which is operative in the coloniality of power and knowledge. This would mean that for Quijano any south-south dialogue between those excluded, oppressed, and violently fragmented cultures is simply a myth, since in every case the agents involved would be mere creations of the modern engine of progress. Inversely, this is why change could occur only through history, rationality, and progress. One may contrast this position with that of philosophers of liberation like Enrique Dussel, for whom philosophy today requires a south-south dialogue in which the excluded and discarded thought of the oppressed may engage in its own trans-modern dialogue.27 The task is a development of philosophical dialogues that do not depend or refer to Western modernity. Such trans-modernity, such thinking in radical exteriority, is impossible for Quijano.28 When Quijano does reach for a thinking that is Latin American, he turns toward the recognition of Latin America’s participation in the unfolding of modernity. The utopian thought of Western modern philosophy comes from indigenous experiences that reach the other side of the Atlantic in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and during the period of the development of modernity in the West, during the Enlightenment, the Americas are on par with when not ahead of Europe (particularly with respect to political revolution).29 Here the indigenous appears only through their inscription into the history of Western modernity: They are represented through the modernizing movements in Europe and in the Americas. As a result they appear through processes of exclusion, since the view of the American participation in modern political revolutions concerns processes and the development of institutions that ultimately used and excluded the indigenous through the criollo revolutions of the nineteenth century. While Quijano’s analysis of the coloniality of power and knowledge exposes the lineages and systems that make such exclusion possible, his treatment of modernity in relation to Latin America shows how he thinks the other is always a function of and reinscribed into a project of modernity, that is, of modernity’s history, rationalism, materialism, and production. When Quijano does reach beyond Western history and time, he does so by appealing to Garcia Márquez’s writing in terms of a “mythical” writing that articulates a sense of historical time diverse from Western historical temporality. What is curious is that one must move from the real to the mythic in order to engage Latin American reality. This is because Quijano remains with a rationalist historical origination that delimits his critique to the point that the only possibility outside of the Western coloniality of time is itself a version of the product (and thus within the parameters) of rationalist, materialist, dialectic concepts and expectations inseparable from the coloniality of power and knowledge. I should emphasize that by exposing the coloniality of power and knowledge, Quijano’s analysis is pivotal to the development of Latin American thought and

Remaining with the Decolonial Turn | 129 for understanding Western philosophy as well. In Quijano’s analysis one finds a fundamental relationship between philosophy and coloniality: Western modern thought develops in part as an historical racist and capitalist construction. This construction remains in play to date, and with it is associated a temporal historical prejudice that makes impossible all and any other sources for philosophical thought and encounters outside of the time line of progress and production. But Quijano’s powerful analysis does not displace the fundamental concepts that underlie the coloniality of power and knowledge. To say it in terms of history and geopolitics, in light of Quijano’s analysis one may go as far as to point out that Western thought and philosophy are now placed in another context, open to a critical destruction of the concepts that affirm and sustain the coloniality of power and knowledge, which also limit philosophy as an endeavor in general. Moreover, the epistemic temporal-racial prejudice (that excluding mechanism) has been exposed as the underbelly of Western modern thought. However, philosophical thought in its categories and margins has not yet been put in play and brought to its limits. This is because as we have just seen, if one were to remain at the level of geopolitical and social-political critique, such critique would ultimately result in a reinscription of the lives and the sense of the excluded into a conceptual space of existence sustained by a Western rationalism that remains unthought in a radical transformative way. To close, the problem with Quijano’s analysis is that there is no outside of the disposition toward progress, production, rationality, and history that underlies Western modernity, and as a result his thought responds to the system without violating its rational instrumental requirements and the project of progress of material (immanent) history.

Radical Exteriority, or Unbridled Anachronism Quijano’s analysis brings forth the dark or underside of modernity through an historical materialist analysis that leaves no other possibility for thought than the construction of another intersubjectivity and reality founded on an analogous rational historical moment of progress. As I said above, there does not seem to be a possible outside for a thought liberated from Western modern instrumental rationalism. However, this point goes beyond Quijano’s own intentions in his analysis. This is because in recognizing the coloniality of power and knowledge as a constitutive element of Western modernity, Quijano exposes neither an outside nor an inside but modernity in its movement. In light of the racist and temporal prejudices that characterize Western modernity, the question is not how and whether the other will speak or be heard. The crucial point is not even that oppression, exclusion, and violence are definitive elements of modernity. These are aspects that without doubt situate it in its distinct occurrences. The issue is that in exposing the coloniality of time and the epistemic prejudice that go along with the coloniality of power and knowledge, Quijano’s analysis puts into ques-

130 | Decolonial Turn and Dissemination of Philosophies tion the very elements that sustain his critique: historical materialism, critique, and rationalism in its ever-unfolding dialectic of theories about how and when the other is excluded and how the negative may be recovered in a positive sense. In short, the exposure of the prejudice that organizes existence in terms of the coloniality of power and knowledge exposes Western modernity to its self-deconstructing movement by showing the undoing of the dialectical promise of an unfolding of reason and its ever-servile negativity. The very existence of the excluded and oppressed is not just negativity; rather, those lives, lineages, practices, languages, and expressions discarded (or included by exclusion) by modernity expose ways of being not created by Western rationalism and not available for systematic calculation, manipulation, transformation, or even rationalist critical “salvation.” Latin America’s concrete realities figure distinct concrete living time-spaces, differences that cannot be subsumed and that at the same time mark the impossibility of the project of modernity. To say it in other words, Latin America and the very history of colonialism are explicit configurations of the inoperative aspect of the Western modern project. Neither outside nor inside modernity, in movements that will slip from reason, progress, and history, the Americas will continue to undo modernity. These inoperative movements have played out modernity’s hopes and “unreason”30 since the inceptive insertion of the land and peoples of the new world into history, even before the movement became a narrative of modern belated and failed progress under the impossibly ambiguous name “America.” Thus, Western modernity does not determine the Americas, but the Americas mark the impossibility of instrumental, subjectivist rationalism and the associated sense of modernity as articulations of humanity and freedom. This occurs with the ever-failing attempts of modernity to give rational and theoretical form to human freedom, a failure that becomes explicit once one takes seriously the inseparability of the coloniality of power and knowledge and the project of the Enlightenment. The Americas mark the failure by slipping, mixing, reinscribing, and undoing the time, space, and narrative of modern dialectical thought. Latin America, as the name indicates, is neither outside nor inside. It is never on par, in time, or geographically coherent. It is impossible in terms of pure lineages, ordered traceable progress, or the historical line of Western development—and yet this series of discontinuities is the concrete movement of modernity from below. One may reconsider at this point the critical dichotomy between deconstruction and critique, in which historical dialectical critique appears as the practical socio-political call of philosophical thought to its real context and responds with the positive configuration of theories, institutions, and ultimately the recognition of the other. Deconstruction, in contrast, appears as a weak, internal Western critique, which in its exposure and undoing of the power dynamics and neuroses behind Western narrative and the rational subject ends up failing to

Remaining with the Decolonial Turn | 131 produce a positive account of the other’s reality and agency. Such division is not sufficient here if one engages the underside of modernity. On the one hand, as we have seen from looking at Quijano’s analysis, critique without deconstruction remains always under the attraction of the positivist project of progress and of the temporal prejudice of modernity. On the other hand, deconstruction, if limited to a strategy that plays out the undoing of Western onto-theology, the history of metaphysics, and the rational subject, remains a blind attempt to undo what remains untouched, since it is the racial temporal prejudice of the coloniality of power and knowledge that sustains Western thought, including deconstruction within and from a Western perspective. As we will see now, instead of remaining within this theoretical Western divide, Latin America appears from radical exteriority as a severe interruption: as the trace that decenters and plays out Western thought, that exposes rationalist critique, while facing modernity with five hundred years of narratives and concrete lives that articulate distinct ways and senses of beings. When one looks more closely at Quijano’s genealogy, at crucial moments one finds elements at play that do not fit into the rationalist, materialist, historical analysis. If one engages them, if one enters the discussion again with their sound in mind, the analysis shifts toward unexpected spaces not subsumed by instrumental rationalism, by the Enlightenment’s rationalist project in its guises of subjectivity, history, and humanism. Quijano’s genealogy recognizes the origin of the egocentrism that situates European thought at the apogee and center of all existence in the ego conquero. By virtue of repetition, a form of rationality takes its place as it becomes crystalized in the Westernized ego cogito. To say it in terms of Walter Benjamin’s analysis of Western culture, history acquires its direction and Westernized meaning by virtue of the piling up of bodies, massacres, death, exclusion, and a fundamental violence against modalities and configurations of senses of life.31 By discarding life single history takes its course and price. While Quijano’s analysis shows the mechanism of power and knowledge behind history, the life of the oppressed remains the différend, the life that is not history and yet under historical dialectic rationalism.32 With the coloniality of power and knowledge one uncovers another side of modernity, in which there are life, bodies, and distinct vital existences. This is the realm of human experience, that is, of living experience: the flesh and breath of the excluded, the source that is a life calling for its own distinct articulation from outside the Western engine of rationalist historical progress. This life is not some inarticulate noise or a muddled, formless nature that awaits rational determination. For more than five hundred years in Latin America thought has been occurring that is distinct from Western rationalism, not irrational mysticism but thoughtful articulations of existence. This thought awaits beyond and toward philosophy today. The lives in radical ana-chronic movements beyond modern rational history do not fit Quijano’s

132 | Decolonial Turn and Dissemination of Philosophies analysis, and therefore he must assign them ambiguous places, one in the “mythical” realm of Garcia Márquez and the other in the utopian project of an intersubjectivity that appears as the result of a dialectic that once again leaves nothing outside of the system of production and progress under a new but still historical materialist project. The fate of critique is critique and rationalism. Under this way of thinking, the fate of life is the system under which life by necessity unfolds according to the requirements of instrumental rationalism, produced, ordered, and at the next stage of progress. But how would one engage in thought if not through critique? I close with just one indication: Neither the ego conquero nor the indigenous belongs to or fits within the historical rationalism that sustains Quijano’s analysis. Is one to believe that the existence of the mapu-che (literally people of the earth), with their lineages, practices, traditions, are the product of Western modern instrumental rationalism today? Which normative critique would begin from the concept of pachamama,33 and what would occur to that sense of existence when turned toward an historical materialist project? One could follow this unsettling impossibility of making sense of the advent of modernity with a question concerning the construction of the body over and against the rational, a body which must be forged in light of the destruction of lives, that is, as a way of adjudicating a place to violence within the domain of the rational. But this would answer to a need itself obsessive, a need to clean up and conceal what cannot be subsumed, saved, or said in the name of a progress that by now in our discussion is already undone by its exposed secret underside. As in the case of the mapu-che and pachamama, in these lives one finds a margin not of Western philosophy. As we just have seen, within the discourse of Western modern thought as well as within the discourses generated by a critical thought like Quijano’s, one finds a radical un-inscribable exteriority. One’s thought is exposed to this radical exteriority, that is, exposed to the incompleteness internal to the critique, exposed to that which may perhaps best be engaged in fecund silence and listening, in finding oneself and one’s place and time. One is put into question by proximity to another that may refute one’s critique as useless. This occurs in being set back, in having the progress of history stopped by what remains vital, adrift, and tacitly challenging: a being in radical exteriority, an unbridled reality that may liberate and transfigure us (rather than responding to that radical exteriority by further covering it over through critical discourses and new theories toward “liberating” and “including” the other through the recognition of its “working” negativity.) Through our discussion we have come to face “the affirmation of the other that misses missing the other.” The issue is now to think in this exposure. This would mean engaging a limit and possibilities for thought and for the senses of distinct human knowledge in their difficult articulations, an engagement in awareness of but also out of one’s attentiveness to dis-

Remaining with the Decolonial Turn | 133 seminating living concreteness—beyond the coloniality of time, power, and knowledge and at the limit of our affirmations and critique.

Openings: From Critique to Modernity at Large, a Note on the Displacement of Western Modernity as the Origin and Future of Philosophy and Human Freedom Before continuing on to the rest of our discussion of Latin American philosophy in light of the coloniality of power and knowledge, I will take a moment to discuss the major implication of Quijano’s analysis for the understanding of modern Western philosophy and for the development of philosophy as world philosophy. I will do this by engaging the work of another Latin American and Caribbean thinker, Ramón Grosfoguel, particularly focusing on the way he extends Quijano’s insight. As we have seen, Quijano understands difference as generated by the system and therefore as within the system. This results in a situation in which the sense of a total exteriority from which to engage the coloniality of power and knowledge seems impossible. However, Quijano’s thought results in the displacement and fecund rupture of the idea of a world organized and dependent on Western rationalist instrumentality and its particular understanding of the origins and aims of modernity. Subsequent to this displacement one may think in light of the system of power and knowledge that constitutes modernity (instead of identifying modernity with Western instrumental rationalism). This means becoming aware of a double modernity, the side of Western capitalism and the concealed coloniality that is inseparable from Western capitalism and constitutive of the larger world event that is the arising of modernity.34 This duality exposes in modernity’s coloniality the lives and histories that have been subsumed and redefined by the new world system but that at the same time, in being part of the world system and not merely the other of Western rationalism, remain other sites and expressions of modernity. In short, modernity is much larger than is understood by the myth of Western history and rationality, which judges it to be the apogee and sole bearer of the future of humanity. Modernity in its larger sense arises out of and composes unbridled realities with respect to Western rationalism. This is the case because ultimately modernity, in the larger interpretation of it, ends up being constituted by all the other ways of thinking put to work and excluded by the coloniality of power and knowledge. Indeed, modernity in its narrow Western sense is but one speck of sand in a modern storm that rages over the world in the form of new lives, new senses of existence, and new possibilities for human freedom in the awareness of the movement of historical change driven by the actors of those histories (rather than a temporality dependent on the past).35 We are speaking of the secularization of human consciousness, which has traditionally been identified with the European Enlightenment and the French Revolution but

134 | Decolonial Turn and Dissemination of Philosophies now is exposed in its living dimension as a world transformation that results from the movement of modernity born of and perpetuated by the colonizer and the colonized, by the Western rational subject and the sequestered, concealed, and excluded modernity that exceeds the Western rationalist narrative. In short, in light of modernity in its broadest form, thought is now a matter of all the modernities in play. This is a fecund rupture with the myth of Western egocentric philosophies, a moment of rupture in which the requirement for philosophical thought to identify itself and be defined by the Western philosophical tradition is merely a provincial proposition.36 As we will see now, one finds the concrete articulation of this fecund rupture behind Quijano’s thought articulated in the work of Puerto Rican thinker Ramón Grosfoguel. In his essay “The Epistemic Decolonial Turn,” Ramón Grosfoguel recognizes the moment of exposure to modernity at large, to its colonial side, and takes it further by bringing forth the modernity that until now has been excluded in its concrete and lived form.37 In his discussion Grosfoguel shows that what arrives in the Americas with the conquistadors and plays a determining role in the unfolding of modernity in its coloniality is not only a system of labor control and capital production, as Quijano sees it. Many more elements affect life at every level and together make up the distinct structures of power and resistances that ultimately configure modernity at large in its radical and fecund distinct sites. Grosfoguel writes in a paragraph worth quoting at length for its concrete illumination of the sense of modernity’s concealed side or coloniality: What I attempt to do is to shift the location from which these paradigms are thinking . . . what arrived in the Americas in the late fifteenth century was not only an economic system of capital and labor for the production of commodities to be sold for a profit in the world market. This was a crucial part, but was not the sole element in the entangled ‘package.’ What arrived in the Americas was a broader and entangled power structure that an economic reductionist perspective of the world system is unable to account for.38 From the structural location of an indigenous woman in the Americas what arrived was a more complex world-system . . . a European / capitalist / military / christian / patriarchal / white / heterosexual / male arrived in the Americas and established simultaneously in time and space several entangled global hierarchies.39

Here Grosfoguel expands the idea of modernity by focusing on what is not apparent to the European and later North American project of capital building and control of labor and production. Modernity in its coloniality or underside has other aspects that are inseparable from it, which constitute a structure of power and knowledge much more complicated than that seen from the position of power. What is crucial here is that Grosfoguel is able to engage the locus of enunciation of the colonized from and with the colonized experience.40 He does this by focusing on what the colonized sees. In other words, he does so by shifting the epistemic paradigm or the structure of what counts as knowledge to the gaze of

Remaining with the Decolonial Turn | 135 the indigenous woman. Only by attending to and thinking with that experience is it possible to think otherwise than in Eurocentric rationalist terms. But this shift is not merely the uncovering of another realm of experience (as understood by the Western traditional expectations about what constitutes and drives human knowledge and humanity in general). By turning to the gaze of the colonized, Grosfoguel exposes a dense and infinite space of oppression, struggle, and resistance, which serves to open the system Quijano has exposed beyond the system’s possibility of giving determination or colonizing all forms of life. Grosfoguel lists the dimensions of experience that are at play for him in the configuration of the coloniality of power and knowledge as seen out of the consciousness of the colonized: 1 a particular global class formation where a diversity of forms of labor (slavery, semiserfdom, wage labor, petty-commodity production, etc.) are going to co-exist and be organized by capital as a source of production of surplus value through the selling of commodities for a profit in the world market; 2 an international division of labor of core and periphery where capital organized labor in the periphery around coerced and authoritarian forms (Wallerstein 1974);41 3 an inter-state system of politico-military organizations controlled by European males and institutionalized in colonial administrations (Wallerstein 1979);42 4 a global racial/ethnic hierarchy that privileges European people over non-European people (Quijano 1993, 2000);43 5 a global gender hierarchy that privileges males over females and European patriarchy over other forms of gender relations (Spivak 1988, Enloe 1990);44 6 a sexual hierarchy that privileges heterosexuals over homosexuals and lesbians (it is important to remember that most indigenous peoples in the Americas did not consider sexuality among males a pathological behavior and had no homophobic ideology); 7 a spiritual hierarchy that privileges Christians over non-Christian/non-Western spiritualities institutionalized in the globalization of the Christian (Catholic and later Protestant) church; 8 an epistemic hierarchy that privileges Western knowledge and cosmology over nonWestern knowledge and cosmologies, and institutionalized in the global university system (Mignolo 1995, 2000, Quijano 1991).45 9 a linguistic hierarchy between European languages and non-European languages that privileges communication and knowledge/theoretical production in the former and subalternize the latter as sole producers of folklore or culture but not of knowledge/ theory (Mignolo 2000).46

What this series of levels of experience show is that the colonial modernity is not just a product of the system of power and knowledge driven by the Western capitalist project of production of capital and labor-production control. Moreover, the way of understanding modernity is not to see it through the perspective of capital production and its epistemic project. When one recognizes the distinct levels of experiences undergone by the colonized, one exposes the distinct loci of

136 | Decolonial Turn and Dissemination of Philosophies enunciation figured by the lives of the excluded in their specific situations and articulations. Thus, distinct issues, limits, and possibilities begin to appear. This is all the more evident if one considers that these various levels cross, overlap, and intrude into the very attempts to theorize any of them as a single separate and determining experience over all others. In other words, Grosfoguel’s analysis shows that a radical exteriority exists vitally within the system: This becomes evident only once one takes the displacement of Western rationalism and the appearing of other modernities seriously, and this means beginning to listen and to think with the distinct loci of living enunciation that are beyond the idea of modernity and humanity as a Western product and as having a Western fate. Here Quijano’s limitations are overcome by turning to the concrete locus of enunciation of distinct modernities. In his extending of Quijano’s uncovering of modernity at large beyond Western rationalism appears an unbounded and fecund opening that makes possible a new project of world philosophies. Such thinking will arise from and with the excluded realities that are the undercurrent of modernity, in a movement that transgresses the center-periphery model to engage radical exteriority in its double movement of liberation, that is, as the distinctness of lives that bear the oppression as well as the resistances and liberating dynamics operative in modern life and thought, conceived in their broad, unbridled, and fecund movements.

PA RT 3 Thinking from Radical Exteriority

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Yucatán Thought Situated in Radical Exteriority as a Thinking of Concrete Fluid Singularities Hoy lo universal es también la visión desmesurada del latinoamericano. Today what is universal is also the unbridled vision of Latin Americans. —Miguel Littin

The previous chapters led us to a difficult place. Latin American thought is not about Latin America but figures a yet unthought delimitation of the very system we have come to know as modernity and modern philosophy. The exposure to this situation offers an opening for thinking from beyond the instrumental rationalism of contemporary modernity, from radical exteriority. Latin America is a concrete living and articulate reality that, as the underside of modernity, displaces the Western North American and European claims to a hegemonic, selfsufficient, and autonomous power and causes a fecund opening for understanding anew philosophical thought. In this sense, Latin American thought arises not as exterior to Western modernity but out of its own distinct experience. One finds an opening toward this displacement in Dussel’s call for a geopolitical consciousness with respect to thought and along with it a need for thinking otherwise than in terms of the Western modern tradition. It is not enough to recognize the site of enunciation; the movement of thought and the way the situation is heard and enunciated are also in question. The first section of this chapter introduces a general way of situating one’s thought in relation to our previous discussion by shifting from a system-oriented thought to a thinking with and out of fluid singularities and their events. The second section, titled “Yucatàn,” refers to the situation and space opened up for philosophical thought when one sets out from the radical transformative movement figured by Latin American reality and thought.

De Otros Lados: From Here, from There, and from Other Places: Beginning to Think from the Fluidity of Distinct Singularities The title of this section means to introduce the rest of this book and playfully echoes the three sections in Julio Cortázar’s novel Rayuela (Hopscotch): “de acá”

139

140 | Thinking from Radical Exteriority (from here), “de allá” (from there), and “de otros lados” (from other places). These three moments do not mark a series of separate stages or locations but, together, engage a distinct consciousness with respect to one’s existence. I believe that this kind of mindfulness to fluid configurations of borders and identities may serve to introduce a way of understanding Latin American thought in its situated or concrete possibilities today. In the previous chapters I have marked certain limits in the way Quijano and Dussel engage the issue of Latin American thought and its situation. One central difference is that in Dussel’s case a Latin American philosophy becomes possible through a rationalist system grounded on an exteriority to the capitalist and colonial system already in place as the center of domination and dependency. For Quijano this exteriority is impossible, given that the system of domination is the matrix in and from which any claim to identity may occur. These two positions are seemingly irreconcilable: either one thinks from total exteriority or from within a totalizing system. This difference, however, is grounded on the shared assumption that existence is a matter of systems, rational ordering, and a logic that requires determination over fluid ambiguity and transformative movement. Yet if one takes experiences such as subjectivity, culture, and the configuration of a people as fluid, migrating, and transformative movements, then it is possible to begin to think from a sensibility oriented by total exteriority, in critical engagement with a system that not only situates the excluded but is itself dependent on the excluded and the radical exteriority of the excluded. Neither in nor out but instead located in the movement of such differentiations, this is the space for a Latin American thought that unsettles the static coloniality of power and knowledge we have been discussing. This is a thinking de otros lados. Some observations made not long ago by Santiago Castro Gomez clarify the implications of this engagement with fluid singularity or distinctness.1 As the Colombian philosopher explains in an interview about the second edition of his book Critique of Latin American Reason, the issue is not to think along the lines of Habermas by recovering rationalism in light of already established socio-political structures or to leap toward a radical difference that would repeat the history of exclusion by securing silence, absence, and singularity as that which remains and must remain outside the system.2 Moreover, in engaging these fluid and distinct movements, one cannot become the philosopher that gives a system to the people and articulates their reality and future. What remains, then? We are left with the engagement of concrete lived experiences in their dense lineages, histories, fragmented representations, failures, losses, and light dispositions. Lo distinto, distinct singular life in its very movement, is the place of thought. I mean that thought occurs in the undergoing of life in distinct singularities and in the attentiveness one may sustain with respect to that fluid, transformative, and affirmative movement of life.3 As we have seen already in the figures we have discussed, all of them seek to engage their situation, and in every

Yucatán | 141 case something of this distinctness becomes apparent. Moreover, as it is also apparent by now (in light of the figures and issues that become salient through the discussion of Latin American thought in the previous chapters), this thinking cannot sustain itself by remaining wedded to a traditional separation between philosophy, the social sciences, and aesthetic experience or by continuing to believe in the myth of the separation between the ruling rational (mind) and the irrational (body).4

Yucatán, or the Angel of Anti-History Out of radical exteriority one sees the impossibility of speaking in terms of one being and its historical destiny. 5 We may begin by looking at October 12, 1492, and considering how in that inceptive moment not only does an unknown continent enter into European history but European history and onto-theological metaphysics simultaneously are forever transformed as well. By entering a world they could not conceive before or articulate thereafter, Europeans themselves would be altered in ways they never could have fathomed. In Cartas de relación, a series of letters written to the king and queen of Spain, Hernán Cortés relates the story of how the peninsula today known as “Yucatán” came to have its name and in doing so makes the argument that would give him the name of discoverer of Mexico.6 According to Cortés, the conquistadors who had arrived on that land before him had met a number of natives and had asked them for the name of the place, the name by which the conquistadors came to identify and claim possession of the new found land. He then explains that when the Spaniards had asked the natives for the name of the peninsula, the natives could only say “Yucatán, Yucatán,” which literally means, “I don’t understand anything.”7 With this “naming”—this mark of not understanding—worlds open. On the one hand, voiceless or sequestered worlds eventually were gathered under the perplexing name of “Latin America.” On the other hand, we find a transformation within European existence itself (the decentering of its very claim to centrality, objectivity, and rationality), which, with few exceptions, still remains concealed. At this point “Yucatán” does not simply refer to a geopolitical situation. “Yucatán” marks the encounter of asymmetric temporalities and the impossibility of a single determination of identity as modern philosophy would have it. “Yucatán” appears here as a naming, and this naming is a sign of a double slippage. Latin American reality escapes the European logic and its single history, since it cannot be inscribed into it in a comprehensive manner. At the same time European logic becomes undone by its naming and determining Yucatán in the way it does. As we will see now, the logic of naming marked by “Yucatán” is analogous to the movement of différance, in which the sign serves as a place of displacement, loss, and dissemination of meanings. However, the movement happens beyond the economy of Western thought. It is the concrete, temporalizing movement of the excluded (Dussel) and

142 | Thinking from Radical Exteriority of modernity at large (Quijano) that is to be engaged. Therefore, the question becomes: How is Western thought situated by this inceptive encounter? In the double movement of the sequestering of worlds and the transformation of European existence, one discovers a Europe that in inscribing Yucatán into its historical and ontological discourse (the representation of all that is said to be in terms of one system or sense of Being) now speaks in tongues, since it does not understand what it names and persists in naming without understanding. Western history and onto-theological thought’s naming—in giving a place and identity to the named—ultimately point to nothing except their inadequacy in terms of the temporality and the ontological way of recognizing and giving articulation to all and any existence. This inadequacy is not a result of the encounter of Western history with its other, with a stranger, the barbarian or colorful indigenous that can or should be recognized and inscribed in opposition to Western history, rationality, and civilization. The problem of Western thought is not resolved by the improvement of the Western apparatus when it learns to recognize its other, as it polishes its rationalist apparatus of re-cognition and production. But, one may ask, what does Yucatán figure if not a challenging encounter with the other? Yucatán speaks the inadequacy of that very Western ontological and historical tradition/myth when confronted with what is not its other. Yucatán marks simply, and literally, the barbarous; it is a matter of that which is beyond the Western appropriative historical writings and its allocation of existences under the requirement for a single history and original identity.8 To speak in terms of a break in the Hegelian historic dialectic, Yucatán marks a space of non-recognition, a non-dialectical space. This marking of a non-recognized and non-dialectical space occurs because the native does not appear to the Western modern mind as a distinct native life, that is, as what ultimately cannot be comprehended, manipulated, and redefined. More specifically, the native appears as the Western modern mind’s other, that is, as that which is included by exclusion as the Western modern project constructs its exotic non-rational other (the savage). In this sense, there is no knowledge that may be understood as a fulfilled rational consciousness through a dialectic encounter: The conqueror never sees the conquered as his equal, so the struggle for identity never happens.9 I must emphasize, in terms of Western modern thought this is a moment of “non-recognition,” but this non-recognition does not refer to a movement of withdrawal or difference that is beyond life. Rather, it is the life and configurations of existence that have been going on but have been excluded that become apparent. This becoming apparent means a necessary transformation in how one conceives of representation and of the very coming to presence of all that is. One may think here of Dussel’s differentiation between proxemia (the relation of thing to thing) that orients Western thought and the human-to-human, face-to-face encounter in radical exteriority. One may also consider the sense of aesthetic experience, as I have sug-

Yucatán | 143 gested in previous chapters, in terms of experiences that do not begin from a separation of the rational from physicality, of the political from embodied sensibilities, of the linguistic from the pre-linguistic sensibilities at play in language. In short, one issue that is central to Yucatán is that life remains to be engaged in its own terms and through affective and articulate ways of understanding existence in which the senses of being are configured. This also means that the excluded is not the negative of Western discourse; it is not that which awaits “representation” in order to take its place among Being. The issue I want to emphasize here, following this last observation, is that of the unsettling suffered by Western history and onto-theological thought as this thinking makes its claim to what it does not understand and cannot subsume.10 At this point, Yucatán (not understanding anything and yet insisting in naming, determining, controlling) becomes part of Western historical writing and understanding. As a result the conceptual structure of values and the modality of the very configuration of identity that has oriented the West in developing the modern ego cogito (and its privileged epistemic place) have been contaminated, displaced by the senselessness and impossibility inherent in the rationalist European discourse. Thus, Western modern rationalism from the outset figures its own undoing. Yucatán, not understanding, belongs now to the unfolding of Western history and its metaphysics of identity. Much like the plague that came to Europe by way of a ship that never seemed to touch European ports, the deconstruction of Western history and metaphysics already begins when Yucatán, the Americas, is taken over as part of what belongs to the identifying instrument that is the history of the West.11 In positive terms, one may look at the recovery of this moment of irreparable or radical difference as a call for thinking in terms of being in distinctness rather than in terms of universals; one may look at the recovery of this moment in terms of histories and concrete lives, instead of in the terms of a single historical destiny. A single document that may serve as a case for discussion is the Codex Telleriano-Remensis from circa 1550. A document much like Yucatán, the Codex Telleriano-Remensis does not have a place; as a result, its lacking of place, its displacement, indicates much.12 In its pages one finds Aztec pictographic language, Latin, and Castilian alphabetic writing side by side in a manner that challenges the very idea of a single historical consciousness bound to alphabetic writing as the rarefied form of knowledge and reason. We find in that insurmountable difference between pictographic language and alphabetic writing a site of interruption—the interruption of the appropriation of existences that, as Walter Mignolo has clearly shown, takes place in The Darker Side of the Renaissance through the rise to supremacy of alphabetic writing and that specific way of understanding all senses of beings.13 At the same time, we can also find in this moment, as well as in the other examples mentioned in this section, a possible crisis, that is,

144 | Thinking from Radical Exteriority a possible moment of decision incommensurable with the limits of Western ontotheological history. By virtue of their asymmetric encounters with the Western tradition’s historical conceptual structures, these are sites, places, moments, and opportunities for a beginning to unfold. Such a beginning, I would suggest, may be an articulate thought in its diversifying identities, a thought fecund in its situated exteriority. Such a situated exteriority does not keep one out of the center but shows us to be at that fluid margin that is human existence today with its evanescent borders, perpetual migrations, and immediate proximities in radical exteriority. A crucial implication appears here, one that follows Quijano’s insight concerning the kind of horizon for existence that is configured under the development of the coloniality of power. As Quijano explains, with the rise of the Western subject appears a single linear history: a specific temporality organized in terms of a past either uncivilized or on its way to modernity and a progressive present that belongs only to modern Western existence and that contains the future. Given the disruption in modernity, the very understanding of temporality as a single ontological problem should now be rethought in light of the distinctive experiences of temporalities that occur in the unsettling and originary transfiguration of our understanding of philosophical thought and the configuring of senses of beings. Such interruptive thinking from exteriority is not predicated on the futurity of the thought but on a poly-temporal exposure in which what has traditionally been considered past may very well be a parallel temporal-spatial existence or an outright encroachment and interruption of the present and its futurity. In other words, time cannot be a single horizon for thought, since modern philosophy is no longer the future of all other past civilizations. This does not mean, however, that history is no longer an issue. On the contrary, history is central to the argument, but it serves as genealogy. As we saw in Quijano, genealogy allows for understanding one’s situation and consciousness. Indeed, without recourse to memories and practices life may remain a matter of logic and scientific fact, both of which respond to Western instrumental or utilitarian rationalism. However, unlike Quijano would think, the issue is not that of an historical matrix and its fateful line of progress. The question is one of encounters, encroachments, engagements, losses, and resistances between distinct configurations of senses of being out of distinct life experiences. To say it in terms of another thinker who understood the sense of history from radical exteriority, Walter Benjamin: to be contemporary one must be critical of one’s situation, and this criticism only comes from outside the operative system of Westernized history. To be critical means being exposed to the unsurpassable, the unexpected, and the violence that is inherent in and yet sequestered by the winnings of history. At the same time with this exposure one finds as well open possibilities of

Yucatán | 145 engaging life not as potential to already set goals and a project of progress but rather as a distinct, transformative, interruptive collapsing and dispersing. But such thinking does not seek to continue history, does not fit a dialectic movement of progress; it is the anti-history of life before history, nature, and reason—the articulate anti-history that waits for us in the primal voices of the cante flamenco, in the paintings of the caves of Altamira, in the gaze of a child, in the silencio profundo de América: in that voice of which we seem to remember a feign echo when we are again left speaking in the borrowed and spent language of history.14

What Is a Universal? Thinking in Distinct Reflexivity Undoubtedly, calling for a thought that arises in radical exteriority and is distinct in its configurations of meanings, in the epistemic limits in which ideas are given form and articulation—as well as in the very dispositions and projective horizons out of which rationality may find its orientation, logic, and values—must raise the question of communicability between distinct groups. One may easily believe that without recourse to universal reason, history, and common language, the foundations for communication are simply lost. Indeed, Leopoldo Zea and Dussel, as well as Salazar Bondy, all in some way call for a universal dialogue. For all of them the alternative would be isolation, provincialism, and a solitude Gabriel Garcia Márquez articulates with admirable clarity in One Hundred Years of Solitude. Furthermore, to understand culture and history as the basis for Latin American thought is to already appeal to a universal dialogue across time, and this occurs in Zea as well as in Aníbal Quijano. In other words, under the idea of history lies the idea of universality in a dialectic movement, be it in terms of culture and institutions, as in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, or in terms of a pure logic of power or force, as in Hegel’s later thought. In either case, history and culture are the result of a universal movement, which takes concrete form in institutions, cultural mediations, and peoples’ material lives. Given the uncovering of ana-chronic simultaneity, however, the very idea of universality must be rethought. This is something that not one of the philosophers we have discussed sees clearly. Each of them understands universality as the realm of rationality and language that allows for communication across differences. In the case of Zea one enters a world dialogue by reinterpreting the already operative universal problems. For Salazar Bondy the issue is one of reason as the site for the mediation of existence, and for this reason language and the procedures of analytical philosophy are crucial, unlike mere cultural historical discourses about that which has been given prior determination through rational operations of thought and their specific logics. For Dussel, although the call for thinking arises from radical exteriority, the language of the center ultimately becomes crucial in order for the excluded to be recognized. The excluded learn to speak the universal language in order to introduce other experiences, in order to

146 | Thinking from Radical Exteriority transform the universal discourse, which will become a pluriversal dialogue as others’ lives and histories, knowledge and needs, become part of how humanity understands itself. In this case, rationalism and pragmatic utilitarianism are the central dispositions that orient Dussel’s thought. In other words, for Dussel pluriversal dialogues are rational dialogues based on pragmatic knowledge, and it is this silent agreement that makes possible any pluriversal dialogue and recognition of the excluded. Behind each of the thinkers we have discussed appears the idea of dialogue as the result of a leap from the particular to the universal. But in affirming radical exteriority it is precisely this idea of a common universal that is in question: thinking arises from exteriority, as an unsurpassable experience that cannot be first conceived as universal or available for universal comprehension. At the same time, how would one enter a “universal” community without abandoning the particular, one’s distinctness, for what is common, for the universal—be it reason, language, history, the face of the other, or the excluded people of the periphery who rise to take the center? The problem is that as long as the universal appears as a requirement to abandon one’s distinctness, all claims to thinking from radical exteriority are impossible. No matter how the philosophers we have been discussing engage the issue, the problem always comes down to inclusion and representation inseparably from inverse exclusion and covering over. Some of the ways to seek inclusion into the universal are thinking of an ambiguous logic that does not entirely define what it enunciates; conceiving of relations that remain open in order to give leeway for distinctness within discourse; or going back and forth between one’s immediate reality and the universal dialogue, putting in check one’s immediate situation over and against the universal discourse. This economy of inclusion becomes unnecessary when one redefines universality in light of distinctness. As I understand it, universality is the result of a reflexive moment in thought and experience (a moment of heart-mind consciousness). When one puts oneself into question, a distancing from the immediate occurs. At that point one enters a universal space of thought. But this is the limit of the concept of universality in its basic origination: One becomes reflexive and distant from one’s situation and thereby enters an open space. That open space is undefined and not ruled by one logic, system of reasoning, or body of argumentative knowledge that would underlie all other discourses and make sense of them. The leap is not into a system, a way of understanding myth, discourses, and expressions of existence that ultimately totalizes all distinctness by including it and “comprehending” it under the requirement of logical conceptual priority. The space of universal dialogue is constructed in the engagement of self-questioning discourses that find themselves open to other self-questioning discourses. The fact that one doubts one’s ideas or values or that one affirms them by attempting to understand them only

Yucatán | 147 means that one is engaging one’s distinctness. To believe that such a self-reflexive moment and the distinct results it yields are definitive and necessary for all humanity is a provincialism that often ends up reducing universality to egocentrism. This is the issue behind not only modern Western rationalism and Western colonialism but all universalizing systems of thought that see their insights and problems as all-encompassing immortal issues. Universality may be defined, then, as being exposed to one’s limitations by engaging one’s distinct situation and, as a result of this, entering into a way of thinking that cannot avoid taking into account what is distinct from one’s immediate situation. It is through this specific sensibility that a pluriversal dialogue may occur, not by entering a universal discourse against distinctness but by engaging one’s distinctness and in doing so gaining a conceptual sensibility that allows for recognizing one’s limits, difficulties, and failures but also the possibilities that open in the encounter with distinctness in thought. This is literally ana-lectical thinking, a thinking in exteriority. One’s situation is always in question, and it is precisely that discipline of being in question that allows one to engage other ways of thinking and being. From this thinking follows that the idea of the movement of history as a single logical development is a belated explication of radical distinctness in fecund and often impossible encounters. To cite a single but today crucial example: Modernity does not only arise out of the Atlantic trade but also as a result of the encounter of Muslim, Jewish, African, and Greek science, philosophy, art, and cultures in Al-Andalus from 711 to 1492.15 This “history” disappears under the Western account of the history of philosophy. Thus, these diversifying histories and lineages can have a place only if history disseminates beyond history (history interrupted by the ignored, excluded, silenced, and unexpected). This may occur as one engages living traditions which up to now have been seen by Westernizing thought as meaningless and even nonexistent. But such engagement cannot occur by repeating the ways of thinking and following the dispositions and goals (conscious and unconscious) of Western thought. What remains to be engaged is not what is and what can be according to the epistemic limits set under Western modern instrumental rationalism (the coloniality of power, knowledge, and time). As we have seen, Latin American thought opens to another thinking, to thinking from the lives and configurations of senses of beings that for the Western rationalist systems are meaningless, understood as the non-being of history, the obscure and undefined raw material of production, or the negativity of reason awaiting mediation. Moreover, as we saw in the previous chapter, we are speaking of a radical exteriority that is inseparable from Western thought; and we will see now how this inseparability is real, concrete, and does not wait to appear. To say it in a way the Jewish Algerian philosopher Jacques Derrida makes clear from his Western situation in Of Hospitality (De l’hospitalité): The other is already here.16

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“We”: The Oblivion of the Center Writing about the views of Latin America held by the tradition of the Enlightenment and modernity in Europe and North America, the Spanish philosopher Eduardo Subirats says: “In these cultures almost always the conflicts and miseries of the South have been contemplated as things of another world.”17 This world in turn is inhabited by the other, or, as Subirats sees it, by an “unnamed other: the postmodern euphemism under which the new elites contemplate America as a non-place, without memory, without conscience, and without voice.”18 For most of Western culture this great distance from Latin America seems a mere fact. Indeed, it is as if the Western man lived in a world impermeable to that other turbulent world. Moreover, as Subirats suggests, if one listens, it is the figure of the other that seems to sustain that distance. As Subirats indicates, the other is non-Western, from an unknown topology (since the myth of El Dorado, or the Caliban from the land of Prospero), and perhaps from a place on its way to becoming part of Western reality. The other is the one who has lost her memory, either to invasion or in the development of a hybrid consciousness, or she is the one who bares an archaic memory surpassed by the linear development of modern reason’s progressive timeline. In this single timeline the other does not yet bear full conscience but is on the way to accomplishing the kind of Western conscience that guarantees order, progress, and ultimately “freedom.” Lastly, again, as Subirats points out, the other does not have a voice except in the context of modern consciousness and its interpretation. It is those in the north and West who must open the space for the other to be heard. As Eduardo Galeano—with his sharp black humor—says, in the West people have language, whereas, with the exception of Western languages, the Americas always spoke in dialects. These differentiations establish a seeming distance: They mark a line that seems to separate Western culture (European and North American) from the distant other world. Here I must add two more remarks about this division. First of all, I believe that the prejudices outlined by Subirat are not held in place by “the Western tradition,” as if this tradition were a given fact, but rather, as we have seen, by a constructed mechanism of coloniality that holds in place Western consciousness as well as that of the colonized. This coloniality and its accompanying modern consciousness, as Aníbal Quijano has clearly shown, were created with the domination of the Americas, were defined by the creation of race difference, and still remain in place to date. This means that the prejudices we outlined not only are the way Westerners see Latin America, Africa, etc. but also hold in place the consciousness of the colonized. The Latin American mind understands itself in the same terms as the European and North American sees it. Therefore, any liberation from coloniality concerns the colonized mind. (Again, this is Fanon’s great insight in Black Skins, White Masks, the uncovering of a common pathology be-

Yucatán | 149 tween dominator and dominated.) Second, given Quijano’s crucial conclusions, I understand the concept of a Western tradition to be held in place by the configuration and perpetuation of modern subjective rationalism and its economic and epistemic projects of domination. As we have also seen in previous chapters, the issue for a thinking from radical exteriority is not simply the undoing of or resistance against the Western monolithic tradition but the critical reconfiguration of the spaces that sustain the myth of that monolithic, appropriative tradition. As a distinct example of this radical hermeneutic task, one may think of the need for a recovery of the history of modern philosophy in light of its radical periphery. This involves understanding modern philosophy’s origins not according to the monolithic myth of Western rationalism as founded by Descartes and nurtured through the Enlightenment and the French Revolution but rather in full engagement with such fundamental elements of modernity as African, Caribbean, Sephardic, and Arab cultures and thought.19 The thought of the Western modern project does not hold the destiny of thought and of all senses of beings.20 The end of history, the death of god, and the struggle of philosophy under technological rationalism and calculation are but moments in a much greater experience that remains to be thought. Liberation from radical exteriority invites us to think in light of distinct, concrete, living singularities and communities. Here we are called to think in unbounded transformative affirmations, situated by a conceptual sensibility that holds concrete distinct exposure as its basic disposition. I believe the Chilean poet Enrique Lihn captures this new discipline well when he explains about the thinking behind his Poesia de paso, Passing Poetry: “Total subjectivism is a fallacy justifiable in other societies, in other epochs. I have more and more the impression I write about others for others. Not about all. Against many.” 21 In closing this chapter I want to remark on what I see as a more immediate and pressing need for engaging the unbounded periphery of modern Western thought. In spite of the power and sharp accuracy of Subirat’s analysis, I believe that today “we” (I mean the academics of center and peripheries external and internal to the centers of Western power) find ourselves in a slightly different situation, where the divide between the Western mind and its other no longer holds its impermeable distance. The place we inhabit today, the place from which and in which our thoughts arise, seems to me to be a kind of suspended bubble. It is a bubble of relative peace, with clean air and drinking water—indeed, a place in which one finds what one needs with relative ease and in which one finds time to enjoy a relationship with one’s thoughts, friends, pets, the environment, and the elements. But this space is held in place by a ring of fire. This comfort and freedom are sustained by the perpetual history of devastation of other cultures, lives, and natural resources throughout that “other world.” This comfort and this leisure depend on ongoing wars (and on financing new ones), on genocides, on the gut-

150 | Thinking from Radical Exteriority ting of small national economies (Jamaica’s history after its liberation, for example), on the consumption of forests and the destruction of ecosystems, on the manipulation of natural selection, and on the use of lives as valueless means of production—a use sustained by undermining peoples’ cultures and thought— lives that to us figure nutrition, danger, or waste to be disposed. This is an economy that I do not believe we can ignore. And even if once in a while one forgets the origin of what one eats, of what one wears, of one’s retirement hopes—it is all funded by that invisible immediacy. In short, “our way of life” depends on that other world. In the last decade this dependency has become evident through the physical overflowing of that ring of fire onto the streets of Europe and North America. Western countries are today a no-man’s land. Today misery, ignorance, poverty, violence, and despair born out of coloniality walk and are a living part of the West. And those eyes of the other now shine in those constellations once thought impermeable, much like the stars that showed the ancients the limit of their world when they gazed toward the heavens at night. But in this new constellation the pretense of a safe distance has been broken. The pretense will not hold, and this raises for us intellectuals living in Europe and North America a fundamental question: How is one to give articulation to such unbounded reality? How is one as philosopher to engage that proximate distinctness in which one finds oneself? How are we to engage our situation otherwise than as we learned from the Western modern tradition, that is, under the assumption that we are the proprietors and destined masters of existence, the central consciousness for which the world appears and is a given phenomenon? Given our situation, we philosophers are challenged to develop a thought that is organic, mutual, and critical. Furthermore, given the turn in some of Western philosophy toward radical exteriority, it is in light of distinctness that we may begin to give active, transformative, and critical articulation to our situations by finding each other in a dialogue sustained by our sensibility or exposure to the living exteriority that in a most intimate manner situates our discourses and determinations of identities and the senses of existence. In the next three chapters we will look at a number of Latin American philosophers and thinkers who in various and distinct ways engage this space of radical exteriority and in doing so open philosophy toward new and transformative horizons.

8

Modernity and Rationality Rethought in Light of Latin American Radical Exteriority and Asymmetric Temporality Hybrid Thinking in Santiago Castro-Gómez The “outsides” are not outside. They must be produced. —Santiago Castro-Gómez

In the previous chapter we gathered a series of conclusions and implications that led to the question of how one may engage the simultaneous ana-chronic or the asymmetric or non-simultaneous simultaneity and the disseminating movement of meanings and forms of life figured by Latin American experience.1 This question is no longer posed over and against modernity; as we saw, Latin America figures a slipping within and beyond modernity, the underside of modernity. This view is possible because of two seemingly contradictory moments. The first is the possibility of a critique of modernity that arises from a sense of total exteriority and in this way becomes a critique from radical exteriority that may put in question the modern Western project of instrumental rationalism. The second position is already implicit in this last observation; Latin American thought is never entirely outside or a total other of modernity. Here appears another major implication for the question of Latin American philosophy: Latin American thought must be a decolonial thought. It must turn against and undo rationalist instrumental thought as figured by the coloniality of power and knowledge and by the coloniality of time and its epistemic prejudice. This does not mean, however, calling for the abandonment of rationality, falling into mysticism, or suggesting a return to utopian indigenism. Latin American thought is the underside of modernity, and this means that it is rational: The question is how one understands rationality out of Latin American radical exteriority. In the following pages I discuss a major figure in contemporary Latin American thought whose work begins to respond to this crucial and difficult question: the Colombian philosopher Santiago Castro-Gómez. I will focus mainly on his major work first published in 1996, Crítica de la razón latinoamericana (The Critique of Latin American Reason), a classic of Latin American philosophy.2 As we will see Castro-

151

152 | Thinking from Radical Exteriority Gómez’s thought marks a crucial transition in our discussion, since in his work one finds a transition from thinking in terms of identity to thinking in radical exteriority.

The Critique of Latin American Reason: The Philosophy of Liberation as a Counter-Narrative to Modernity In his Crítica de la razón latinoamericana (The Critique of Latin American Reason), Castro-Gómez gives a careful critique of Latin American philosophy up to 1996. In the prologue the Colombian thinker recalls his departure from the idea of a search for a Latin American authentic or proper reason by giving a brief account of the series of steps followed by a group of philosophers named the “Bogota group.”3 As he recounts, Daniel Herrera Restrepo makes a Husserlian turn toward the logic behind everyday Latin American life, aiming “to recover the fundamental and operative structures of everyday life.”4 This would mean exposing an “immanent teleology” and thus making explicit the invariable forms that underlie reality. The repetition of the turn to the things themselves is soon followed by Roberto Salazar Ramos, who sees in this turn a move away from a totalizing, romantic Manicheanism in Enrique Dussel and the philosophy of liberation.5 This critical view concerns the division of philosophy in terms of general grand narratives, in which the people and the excluded now take the place of the transcendental subject as the origin of a new world-philosophical age. In contrast to this grand narrative, the Bogota group recognizes the turn to Latin American reality’s underlying logic as the way for Latin American philosophy to engage its concrete situation. The goal and the way are then set: to articulate “the logic of our reason, and to do so through a postmodern approach.”6 Soon after, however, it becomes evident that the goal and the way do not coincide. The philosophers realize that the seeking of a Latin American reason proper to Latin America and distinct from the Western logos should be replaced by an approach that would not merely respond to or form a counter-narrative to modern Western colonizing thought. Rather than repeating the way of thinking of coloniality, they would engage in an archeology of Latin American thought.7 Rather than seeking an authentic Latin American locus and forms, they would focus on demonstrating “the orderings of knowledge that would make possible the formulation of that question and the unfolding of the philosophical discourses that sought to answer it.”8 Castro-Gómez concludes: “The critique of Latin American reason becomes a critique of the discourses that postulate a supposed ‘Latin American reason.’”9 As noted above, the path followed by Castro-Gómez and the group is postmodern, and this means that the critique occurs as “a deconstruction of the narratives, which on the basis of homogeneous identities, insist on representing Latin America as ‘the absolute other’ of modernity.”10 Thus, what comes into question is the idea of the proper, held in different ways by Zea, Bondy, and Dussel. Their search

Modernity and Rationality | 153 implicitly questions the way difference is subsumed under a transcendental subjectivity (for example, the people or the excluded as general categories). Another issue that becomes apparent is the unquestioned position of the philosopher, given the way the relation between intellect and power is examined without putting into question the place from which the philosopher speaks. Castro-Gómez closes his introduction by pointing out that the thought of the philosophers in question functions as a modern counter-narrative, which repeats the epistemic structures and relations of power and knowledge behind modern instrumental rationalist subjectivism. Such repetition, in sustaining the structures of power, can never yield a post-colonial theory that would overcome that way of thinking and interpreting Latin American existence. In order to better understand CastroGómez’s critique, we must turn briefly to his understanding of postmodernity in Latin America. By clarifying the sense of postmodern thought operative in his thinking one may gain a clearer idea of the breadth and power of his thought.

Clarifying Some Clichés about Postmodern Thought As Castro-Gómez first explains, postmodernity is not an ideological position, a set of theories among other sets of theories.11 Instead, it implies a transformation of sensibilities on a global scale. The loss of a central narrative, the putting into question of the ego cogito, and the arising of alterity as the guiding thread for philosophical and social thought are not mere inventions of first-world intellectuals; rather, they result from cultural experiences across the world. The displacement of capitalism into a global economic system in which the outside (or periphery) and the center are inseparable economically, topologically, and existentially are facts that one lives walking down the street in a major European city. Another example is the way foreign students aided the Zapatista movement in Chiapas by monitoring the situation with their laptops day and night in order to spread news. The students’ information sustained a web of communication outside the control and reach of the government and international economic and political interests and outside of the limited and manipulated information of the hegemonic system’s national and international news networks. The rupture of the system of power and information and the ethnic, linguistic, social fractures and displacements that make up “the world” today are a postmodern situation. Yet what does this mean in terms of philosophy and coloniality? Postmodern thought has found strong resistance in Latin America. Referring to Nelly Richard’s explanation about this phenomenon, Castro-Gómez points out two major reasons.12 One is the trauma of the mark of colonialism: This amounts to a distrust concerning what comes from “outside,” which sets a line between the imported and what is one’s own, between the foreign and the national. The second element behind the resistance refers to how postmodern thought directly undoes the heroic narratives that sustain national and populist

154 | Thinking from Radical Exteriority identity discourses. Postmodern critiques put in question the discourses of revolutionary movements like the Cuban revolution as well as the idea of “el hombre nuevo,” the birth of a new human being with the unfolding of the mid–twentieth century revolutions in Latin America.13 As Ramon Grosfoguel has expressed to me, these critiques stop the ideological movements and therefore appear as counter-revolutionary. As a result, postmodern thought may easily be equated with neoliberal and imperialist aims. Furthermore, the equation of postmodern philosophies and neoliberalism in Latin America is further sustained by a series of misconceptions concerning postmodern thought aided by the internalization of the postmodern situation in light of the localist resistances Nelly Richard underlines.14 In his book, Castro-Gómez focuses on four of these clichés and thereby clarifies his understanding of postmodern philosophies and their role in a critique of previous philosophers. His critique serves as a point of departure for a situated thought in light of the radical dissemination we found in Aníbal Quijano’s sense of other histories and simultaneous temporalities in Latin America’s concrete reality. Indeed, through his discussion of postmodernity Castro-Gómez will set up an opening for engaging the simultaneity of temporalities and spaces that one encounters in Latin American experience, an engagement that is the basic aim of his critical genealogical thought. Castro-Gómez identifies four misidentifications of postmodernity: 1. as “the end of modernity,” 2. as “the end of history,” 3. as “the death of the subject,” and 4. “as the end of utopian thought.”15 With respect to the first Castro-Gómez points out that, in spite of the suggestion of a temporal marker by the prefix “post,” ultimately postmodernity is not about the end of modernity. Rather, it is a critical exercise over modernity, and therefore it is the modernity of modernity, as Leopoldo Zea puts it.16 Thus, Castro-Gómez concludes that postmodernity is “the reflexive return of modernity over itself, and not an epochal surpassing.”17 This reflexive turn goes beyond the Enlightenment’s critique because it puts into question the self-image of modernity, namely the idea of a harmony and totality ruled by rational order.18 In other words, behind postmodernity there is a crisis, a decisive turn beyond the meta-narrative of rationalism. But this means that postmodern thought addresses that very crisis, or as Castro-Gómez puts it: “What is sought is not the dismissal of the modern project but to continue it on the basis of other kinds of legitimate narratives also arising from modernity.”19 Postmodernism does not abandon liberatory thought but seeks the undoing of totalizing and essentialist language in its articulation of the liberatory ideals. It would then be the task of postmodernity to do away with the fundamentalist disposition of the Enlightenment’s discourses for the sake of resituating thought in a new discursive context. The second issue is that of “the end of history.” The postmodern position is not that history has ended with the arising of neoliberalism (as Fukuyama famously

Modernity and Rationality | 155 claimed) or with the advent of globalization as the apogee of world neoliberalism. Instead the end marks a limit, and thereby also other beginnings. Postmodern thought “marks the profound crisis of a particular conception of history: that which looked for the unfolding of all human societies on the basis of the same criteria of transformation.”20 If one thinks out of the postmodern condition, that is, with awareness of the difference in human societies, it is clear that one cannot adjudicate and understand those differences in terms of one historical current. Thus, postmodern thought “cuts at the root any pretention of elevating a particular history—European history—as a paradigm of universal history.”21 This marks the limit or undoing of the Hegelian and Marxist analysis. Moreover, this also marks the limits we have already exposed with respect to Zea, Dussel, and Quijano. Castro-Gómez explains that Latin American thought develops in the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century under the aim of participating in the single universal historical logical progress. Philosophers of liberation in the latter part of the twentieth century revel against this universal history only to recognize another inherent logic, namely that of development and underdevelopment, center and periphery. In their case, the logic of history as a grand totalizing narrative is not overcome but is inverted. This occurs as they take as the point of origin of universal history the conquered, the oppressed.22 As we saw in our previous discussion concerning Dussel, the problem is that he still thinks in the totalizing manner of Western modern philosophy. In this way the modern Western idea of history still permeates the thought of liberation philosophers, as this inherent world logic comes to explain not only poverty and wealth but “also the sense of all artistic, philosophical, and cultural manifestations of society.”23 Castro-Gómez goes on to point out that as Foucault shows, there is another way to conceive history: “what is left is a multiplicity of ‘little histories’ that coexist at the same time, without the historian’s recourse to a transcendental criterion that may permit ordering them hierarchically.”24 This vision arises from the realization that history is not a matter of a single progress or of the unfolding of a single logos over and against the barbaric, the primitive, those poor in consciousness or spirit. In short, postmodern thought recognizes critically the long totalizing shadow of history, and at the same time it seeks to begin thinking from the concrete living situation of those small histories Foucault discusses. CastroGómez concludes: [Postmodern thought] concerns the rebirth of ‘little histories.’ And herein lies the challenge for the new generations of Latin American philosophers that are dedicated to interpreting our ‘history of ideas’: to seek and dust off those ‘little histories,’ but without attempting to integrate them into an omni-comprehensive discourse.25

Postmodern thought, then, would engage the concrete situation of simultaneous and disseminating meanings in their distinctness and out of a sense of radical

156 | Thinking from Radical Exteriority exteriority, “out of the study of multiple and irreducible rationalities and practices that must be appreciated in their singularity.”26 The third element of postmodern thought taken up by Castro-Gómez is “the death of the subject.” Not only in Latin America but also in general critiques against deconstruction in the United States and Europe, the impression has been that the death of the subject means the end of subjectivity and, as a result, the operation of a discourse that makes agency in the political and social sense impossible. If this were the case, postmodern philosophies would be the handmaids of neoliberalism and oppressive coloniality, since the critique of subjectivity would only repeat—if not enable and justify—the disappearing of those who are already excluded. This would mean “the neutralization of all reflexive and critical opposition to the dominant instrumental rationality.”27 The reason such an interpretation goes wrong becomes apparent when one asks who the subject undergoing deconstruction is. As Castro-Gómez explains, when Foucault speaks of man and the human as an invention on the verge of disappearing, he does not refer to all possible subjectivities. The subject in question is the vision of humanity in the image of the thinking “I,” that is, the subject in the image of the ego cogito situated at the apogee of history and able to interpret, manipulate, and transform all senses of existence as it sees fit. The subject in demise is the image of that rationality that sees itself through a mono-logical discourse, as an all-powerful subject able to decipher all the mysteries of the universe according to its will.28 “It is the patriarchal subject that animates the conquest and subordination of other peoples and cultures under the claim of bearing the benefits of ‘civilization.’”29 This is the same image that appears in the form of an authoritarian subject, which is the sustaining myth at the empty center of the panopticon. At issue is the demise of an idea of subjectivity ruled by normalizing economies of power and knowledge sustained internally by the constituted normalized subject. As we saw in our discussion of Quijano, we are speaking of the bodies and minds of the colonized under the rule of the coloniality of power, knowledge, and time. Put in this way, the death of the subject does not make for non-agency. On the contrary, the postmodern critique exposes the foci of power and the mechanisms that sustain the various forms of coloniality under the guise of subjectivity and identity. But what is exposed? First of all, the subject is not an autonomous rational vessel. Rationality is shot through with pre-rational forces in which subjectivities are configured. To recall Dussel’s insight, for example, the sense of proximity in radical exteriority sustains our subjectivity in its distinctness; other experiences, like involuntary memory, trauma, loss, sensuous experience, bodily movement, and fluctuation, are all part of subjectivity in an individuation that interrupts, transforms, and decenters the idea of the ego as pure cogitation and of its power over all that is “irrational.” Moreover, as Foucault points out and as Castro-Gómez reminds us, what creates subjects is the ordering of the fields of forces through specific tech-

Modernity and Rationality | 157 niques and practices: doctors and patients, the rational and the irrational or insane, the civilized and the barbaric. Seen in this light, subjectivity does not disappear but rather becomes apparent in terms of the dynamics through which subjectivities take their configurations. As a result of this way of thinking, the subject as a rational centralized origin of all senses of being and knowledge is not lost or dismissed but decentralized (decentralizado).30 Alas, what is lost is the center that rationality constructs and claims. As a result, “what the subject claims today is not centrality, but participation in public life in a society always more multi-polar and interactive.”31 Again, this is not a theory but an articulation of our situation in the twenty-first century. Castro-Gómez goes on: “Not the state, the church, the market, political parties, the army, the intellectuals, workers and peasants, nor any other group in particular may claim the right to centrality.”32 The protagonism and power of public life disseminates in webs and movements of distinct articulations of lives. This not only affirms agency but recognizes it as a necessary dynamic space, a time-space in which determinations of senses of being are always contested and in question. Out of the decentralization of the Western modern subject appears subjectivity in its diverse and diversifying movements: “In the time of this belated modernity the subject does not disappear, on the contrary, the subject multiplies.”33 Furthermore, this dissemination is not the abandonment of reason, the onset of chaos, or a falling into the irrational. “Neither does rationality disappear, rather a space opens for the coexistence of different types of rationality.”34 Postmodern thought does not leave rationality behind but exposes it to a broader and fecund time-space for thought, in engagements sustained by the heterogeneity of subjectivities at all levels: socio-cultural, politico-ideological, and economic.35 The point is not that we have abandoned subjectivity in the name of an indifferent production of relative meanings. One must be precise about the outcome of Castro-Gómez’s position: subjectivity becomes situated in its concrete life movement, and for such situated thought there is nothing relative. Here we return in a much more dense and profound way to Dussel’s insight: First there is life that is not part of a totality, and now we may begin to engage this life beyond the bringing of the distinct into the homogeneous and rational-instrumental space of knowledge.36 The fourth element discussed by Castro-Gómez is “the end of the utopias.”37 The question is, which utopia? Castro-Gómez introduces a difference between two ideas of utopia. On the one hand, there is the rationalist instrumental logic that aims to gather all existence into one united, homogeneous, and harmonious existence, an “ideal society” of eternal peace under reason. On the other hand, there appears a utopian thinking in distinct radical alterity, building from Lyotard’s analysis of language as a game between articulations that are not held together by any meta-criteria. In this sense of language, making arguments, describing, and asking result from complex chains of enunciations, in which there

158 | Thinking from Radical Exteriority is an infinite number of possibilities of connecting various propositions. CastroGómez writes, “The result is the inevitable conflict between various types of discourses and discursive forms, or what is the same, between various forms of life.”38 Against the totalizing idea of a utopia Castro-Gómez introduces a utopian thinking in distinct and ultimately irreducible differences. Heterogeneity and the differend [an irreducible difference in any determination of identity, the inexpressible in each expression] are consubstantial with human speech and cannot be eliminated . . . all attempts to reconcile the existing differences between different language games and forms of life configured by them necessarily end in dictatorship and terror.39

By an inclusive exclusion, the distinct is absorbed and erased by the ideal totalizing society imagined by instrumental rationalism, with its discourses that identify wholes that subsume difference. This utopian totalitarianism also arises when Latin America becomes “the absolute other” of Western culture. As Dussel argues, for example, the point is not to sever Latin America from Western thought but to speak out of radical, critical, engaged distinctness. These reflections on utopian thinking in radical difference lead to an issue we already discussed in the previous chapter, namely, the question of communication and community beyond the concept of universal rationality and order. As we saw above, the space identified as universal does not answer to one kind of rationality, narrative, discourse, modality of existence, or form of life. CastroGómez’s thought here helps to drive this issue further. He writes: The point now is to recognize that we cannot go beyond ourselves (we are condemned to the differend), the point is to know that justice is only thinkable within the frame of a political structure that makes possible the confrontation of differences. Such a structure not legitimated by the narrative of ‘integral emancipation,’ but rather occurs on the basis of strategies of action in which we are conscious that the struggle against injustice necessarily generates new forms of injustice. The question would then be: Which injustices are more or less tolerable for the social group? This is a question, however, that cannot be answered a priori on the bases of a universal meta-language; instead it will be the result, always provisory and contingent, of ‘democratic struggles.’40

This passage may at first seem to deny justice and give up peace. However, the point is precisely the opposite: only in recognizing distinctness in a way that allows for radical exteriorities does a community beyond totalitarianism become possible. This is why the question is not a meta-question and why the general ideals of a people or even the damned as a general concept for emancipation are ultimately insufficient. The point is to begin from a sensibility and conscious awareness of distinctness and to sustain a political space of disagreements, a space of “democratic struggles,” or, as Castro-Gómez puts in the first edition of the Critique, a situation of “dissent peacefully regulated.”41 At issue is a politics of differences, irregularities, singularities, interruptions, and encroachments, in which

Modernity and Rationality | 159 no discourse may claim to define lives or meanings of existence and in which any rational response is subject to the concrete situation of all distinct groups. As Castro-Gómez defines it, under postmodern thought one finds an opening for “a utopia of peaceful coexistence, although necessarily conflictual, between different forms of knowledge and between different moral criteria of action.”42 In this sense the end of the rationalist instrumental utopia, the undoing of totalizing discourses, of formations of the sense of being human, and of the sense of life, must be followed by one’s engagement in that fluid, dense, and fecund space-time of simultaneous ana-chronic configurations of senses of beings. Such a thinking occurs at the limit of the configurations of sense and always in the awareness of risking converting once again rationality into irrational, totalizing rationalism.

A Decolonial Postmodern Thought? Castro-Gómez’s discussion of the four misconceptions about postmodern thought opens a series of moments of possible engagement with the ana-chronic simultaneity of lives and senses of beings we found at the end tail of Quijano’s analysis of Latin American temporality. As we have seen, “the end of modernity” means the undoing of the self-image of rationalism as the way of access to a preestablished order that may define all that is and therefore may have everything at its disposal for manipulation and control. This requires a postmodern turn understood as the reflexive turn of modernity over modernity. The undoing occurs in the critical return of modernity, which exposes the limits of modernity. This means that modernity has not ended but that (as we already noted at the end of our analysis of Quijano) the concrete reality of Latin America figures a return to modernity from beyond its self-image. Given that Latin America’s reality is not separate from the unfolding of modernity, however, this is the return of modernity over itself from a radical critical exteriority. This means that with the undoing of the central narrative organizing modernity around the rationalist instrumental project, one finds the end of a “meta-narrative” and the beginning or opening for “other types of legitimate narratives.”43 Unlike in Dussel’s case, here it is the very manner of thinking that is opened to radical exteriority, to other legitimate narratives that do not require the rationalist interpretation of the philosopher but may enter the discourse in a diagonal manner, interrupting, inviting, encroaching, and enticing thought. Modernity is now thought from radical exteriority, or in other words, in a decolonial encounter from distinctness, anachronic simultaneous configurations of lives, and a disseminating movement of senses of being. The second decolonial moment in postmodern terms becomes apparent: the end of history means the end of the grand narrative of a single line of progress under instrumental reason. At issue is the end of the conception of history that sees the unfolding of all of humanity under its single project, or the coloniality of power, knowledge, and time. What remains is not nothing or

160 | Thinking from Radical Exteriority meaninglessness but the rich and dense concrete experience and articulations of “little histories.”44 From the grand narrative we turn to the excluded, forgotten, silenced histories that may spur thought in its concrete situation and in light of a diverse and diversifying reality. This sense of little histories and the distinct refers also to the site of thought, that is, to the third element of postmodernity with respect to decoloniality. “The death of the subject” does not deny subjectivity or agency; on the contrary, the term refers to a decentering of rationalist self-certainty that opens thought to living, diversifying movement. The self-certainty of the “I,” the rationalist subject, is undone as thinking encounters limits beyond its determinations. Rationality always interacts with the pre-rational, and the pre-rational is inseparable from our behavior. This means that the rational subject is imbedded in life and that life does not correspond or belong to its judgment. One may say that thought becomes exposed in the awareness of a rational subjectivity constituted through distinctness and a sense of exteriority beyond and indifferent to instrumental rationalism and rationalist subjectivity. In decolonial terms, rationalist subjectivity is decentered in the concrete encounter with a radical exteriority that is not its other but rather the living arising of that which rational subjectivity cannot comprehend and yet must understand. Such understanding would occur as an undergoing and going under through the concrete encounter with bodies and lives that put Westernizing rationalism in question and demand and articulate other narratives or senses of the rational. This leads to the last postmodern decolonial moment, to the rethinking of utopia as the possible community sustained by radical exteriority—without recourse to general, totalizing, a priori, or universal concepts for guaranteeing peace, freedom, equality, and liberty. Modernity understood in the postmodern decolonial register is a space of contestation and radical critical engagement, not in the name of an abstract “humanity” but as the enacting of the human in its arising through our engagement in distinct encroachments and in light of that sensibility or sense of total exteriority that we found in Dussel’s insight. He writes that the encounter in justice is the encounter in awareness of our possible rejection; as Castro-Gómez puts it, we are speaking of a thinking always situated by the unsurpassable differend, by our distinct existence.45 In light of this sense of distinctness we are now beginning to think at the limit of rational subjectivity, at the limit of the history of Western modern philosophy, of its project of progress through production, and of the racist and epistemic prejudices that sustain it.

The Critical Ontology of the Present, Radicalizing the Place and Manner of Philosophical Thought In order to further understand Castro-Gómez’s project, in this section I will focus on his essay “La filosofía latinoamericana como ontología crítica del presente:

Modernity and Rationality | 161 Temas y motivos para una Crítica de la razón latinoamericana” (“Latin American Philosophy as a Critical Ontology of the Present: Themes and Motives for a Critique of Latin American Reason”).46 As the title indicates, in this essay CastroGómez aims to give a new direction to Latin American philosophy. This involves a kind of thinking he identifies as the “ontological critique of the present.” Writing about the 1947 publication of Adorno and Horkheimer’s The Dialectic of Enlightenment, Santiago Castro-Gómez explains that in this work the undoing of the modern rationalist project from within that very project becomes evident. The expansion and intensification of rationalism ends up leading to uncertainty, fear, and contingency. As a result, “‘the project of modernity’ in the intensification of its structures ends up self-suppressing itself, doing away with its own normative foundations.”47 Out of the self-exhaustion of the project of modernity, the very way philosophy may engage existence changes. “When modernity was still a ‘project,’ it was possible to conceptualize the social world in a normative manner, as if we could impose over it our taxonomic imperatives of control, rational organization and the prevision of eventualities.”48 However, given the change in social reality, it is no longer rational teleology that orders life. Instead, as he writes, “the collateral and ‘unthought’ effects of modernity have become the engine of politics, economy, and society in the time of globalization.”49 Therefore, today, philosophers find themselves faced with the need to abandon modern philosophy’s binary codes. The examples of such binary thinking he offers in his Critique of Latin American Reason are telling and recall various moments in the previous chapters: modern-traditional, civilization-barbarism, oppressor-oppressed, development-underdevelopment, center-periphery.50 The same categories arise with the coloniality of time and its epistemic prejudices and dispositions. In this sense Castro-Gómez is directly moving toward a thought beyond the coloniality of power and knowledge by pointing to another way of thinking. Furthermore, the examples overflow the categories recognized by Quijano, as they now include both Dussel’s and Quijano’s ways of situating Latin American thought within a world-system paradigm. The last binary set, “center-periphery,” points directly to the categorial differentiation that grounds Dussel’s development of a liberation philosophy in terms of the excluded, the exteriority of the other. One can no longer engage life by asking for determinations in terms of being and non-being, identity and its other. Instead of this, one may encounter experience, life, and the senses of existence through a hybrid thinking that arises from being exposed to what we have called the ana-chronic and disseminating simultaneous temporality of concrete lives and discourses. Castro-Gómez phrases this as “advancing to a hybrid thinking in which we may be able to conceptualize the coexistence of temporalities, spaces, and situations seemingly incommensurable.”51 Here CastroGómez’s thought picks up at the very moment we left open in our last chapter: he seeks a thinking that engages the ana-chronic simultaneity and disseminating

162 | Thinking from Radical Exteriority movement of concrete lives. He then goes on to offer a concrete example of this experience, pointing out that the Latin American access to modernity does not happen primarily through education and the writers and intellectual movements of the avant-garde. Rather it is through new technologies of information that the masses participate in modernity. Latin American culture does not precede radio, film, and television but follows from them. In its peripheral unfolding of modernity, Latin American life challenges modernity’s rationalist framework, that is, the expectation of a society that must unfold according to “a teleological history, epistemic humanism, and enlightened rationalism (la racionalidad letrada).”52 In short, the non-simultaneous simultaneity of Latin American reality challenges the very expectations that underlie philosophical thought. Castro-Gómez draws a similar conclusion concerning Latin American philosophy. He first identifies a series of philosophers whose work has followed the rationalist normative expectations of the modern project. Here appear Salazar Bondy and Dussel as examples of “critical consciousness,” Cerutti Guldberg with his axiology of imaginary utopian thought, the rationalist reconstruction of historical memory under a philosophy of history by Leopoldo Zea and Arturo Roig, and the hermeneutics of a collective identity born of the return to earth and life in Rodolfo Kusch.53 For Castro-Gómez each of these movements falls under the normative rationalist expectation of arriving at an identity claim that may distinguish and identify the sense of being Latin American, thereby grounding a Latin American philosophy. In the case of the philosophy of liberation, Castro-Gómez sees this happening as the excluded, the damned, become an ontological category operating under and responding to the demands of the rationalist expectations of a homogeneous and coherent progress that falls within predictable and ordered forms of meaning and life. This analysis sustains Castro-Gómez’s final conclusion in his Critique, which is that the philosophy of history of Leopoldo Zea and the philosophy of liberation have been counter-narratives of the modern rationalist instrumental project and therefore have not been able to engage in a decolonial turn. This conclusion is worth quoting at length: In marking limits of observation that cannot be transgressed, modern rationalism is situated by the impossibility of looking at itself and to put into questions its historical and empirical presuppositions. This is why the anticolonial critiques of Zea, Dussel, and Kusch are in truth modern counter-narratives, which (articulated from the marginal exteriorities of modernity) make possible observations of second degree with respect to Europe that would have been impossible from the center. Herein lies their merit, as well as their limitation. From a post-colonial perspective instead, the critique of eurocentrism is no longer articulated in the same language of Prospero, that is, in terms of criteria given beforehand and defined a priori by a transcendental subject, since the point is to show that it was precisely this discursive strategy that served the colonial power to represent itself to itself as the origin of meaning and the colonized as ‘the other of itself.’ 54

Modernity and Rationality | 163 As we saw in our critical discussion of Dussel and Quijano, they both rely on and repeat certain criteria taken as a given beforehand by Western modern instrumental rationalism, and thus, although critical of instrumental rationalism, they repeat it in the name of separating themselves from it. In contrast to these philosophies from the seventies and eighties, CastroGómez finds other thinkers who engage life as a reality constituted by “fragmented identities, historical discontinuity, the heterogeneity of cultures, the consumption of symbolical goods, and the proliferation of divergent meanings.”55 Among them, he names such figures in cultural studies as Joaquín Brunner, Néstor García Canclini, and Nelly Richard. Castro-Gómez’s thought engages in a hybrid thinking, which he calls after Foucault a critical ontology of the present. In short, having resituated thought in its living diversified and diversifying context, and having recognized the shift in the expectations that may underlie philosophy given its radical situation, he introduces this new way of thinking in Latin American thought. As he points out: “My aim is to show in what way the ‘critical ontology of the present’ has become fruitful for a philosophical reconceptualization of ‘the Latin American’ in the times of globalization.”56 Thus the idea of the Latin American that has sustained the previous discourses will be put in question, since the modern project’s expectations about reality that sustained the question no longer fit the situation of Latin American philosophers. In order to better understand what this shift means for Latin American philosophy, I will discuss Castro-Gómez’s explanation of what he means by a critical ontology of the present. After that, I will show the implications of this shift in the understanding of philosophy for the Latin American philosophers we have discussed thus far. Castro-Gómez’s idea of a critical ontology of the present follows Foucault’s social critique.57 In what consists Foucault’s model of the ‘critique of society’? First of all, in seeing the present not in terms of its universal validity and rationality, but rather in considering its radical particularity and its dependence on historical factors. In this sense, what Foucault intends is to advance a ‘history of the present’ that does not begin from a normative model of ‘humanity,’ that is, from a particular modern idea of what ‘man’ is. . . . Foucault recognizes here a new way of approaching the problem of modernity, in which, rather than discovering the truth of the basic premises (liberty, fraternity, equality), one seeks to show the technologies of domination that participated in their fabrication, as well as the diverse ways in which they constitute our contemporary subjectivity.58

Therefore, the project attempts to see the present situation not through the view of rationalist universal concepts and expectations (questions about “truth,” “the authentic,” or “identity” in this sense) but by engaging the present in its radical particularity and dependency from historical factors. This means that the ontology of the present, the claims to knowledge and meanings made in the present,

164 | Thinking from Radical Exteriority and the ideals that sustain our sense of existence are now put in question in light of their historical contingency and the structures and instruments of power that situate knowledge and meaning. Thus the present is seen as the result of historical contingency and in light of the social practices that constitute and sustain it. As Castro-Gómez explains, knowledge is not natural but constituted out of specific orderings of experience, which make up a horizon of sense for understanding the world conceptually and theoretically. From this, Castro-Gómez concludes that knowledge, as something historical, is “submitted to transgressions, disequilibrium, changes and mutations.”59 To engage historical contingency is not to engage a logic of progress, a presupposed space of knowledge according to the epistemic delimitations of rationalist instrumentality, or a pre-established order. The critical ontology of the present puts into question these expectations by thinking from the concrete practices that constitute the horizon of knowledge that came to be recognized as modernity and the determination of history and time within that horizon. This putting into question of the prevalent epistemic systems and expectations is not a matter of theoretical shifts that may allow for an expansion of the field of knowledge of philosophy but rather requires engaging the very practices, singularities, and distinct circumstances by which Latin American philosophy recognizes itself. In contrast to the search for a Latin American consciousness and its philosophy (Leopoldo Zea), and in departure from the identification of Latin American existence as the periphery or the other with its possible rationality, Castro-Gómez’s ontology of the present seeks to understand how such issues came to be and are sustained through Latin American thought. Developing this line of inquiry with the aid of the work of Colombian philosopher Roberto Salazar Ramos, Castro-Gómez writes: The issue is not delineating the ‘logic’ of a supposed ‘Latin American reason,’ but rather highlighting which have been the technologies of social control that generate the psychological profile of intellectuals who feel compelled to unearth the mystery of ‘being Latin American’; which have been the instruments of power and knowledge from which was discursively produced an object of knowledge called ‘Latin America.’ 60

Here the issue is not Latin American philosophy, but the practices, in this case the discourses, that sustain this history of thought. What Castro-Gómez seeks is not merely the construction of the concept of Latin America; he wants to critique specific discourses in order to undo the modern rationalism that remains operative in the philosophical understanding of Latin American realities. To say it in a decolonial way, Castro-Gómez is after the undoing of the internal perpetuation of the coloniality of power and knowledge that occurs through the very discourses that attempt liberation from coloniality and the engagement of the concrete Latin American situation. As he explains: “the ontology of the present intends to write the historical discontinuity of the production of those discourses,

Modernity and Rationality | 165 showing their anchoring in certain instruments of organization, selection, activation, hierarchization, and legitimatizing of knowledge.”61 In other words, the way to engage Latin America’s fluid and non-simultaneous simultaneity is by asking about the practices that delimit knowledge and thereby sustain the exclusion of Latin American experience from its very discourses of identity. Thus, for Castro-Gómez and his Critique of Latin American Reason the leading question is not what kind of rationality may dismantle and then recover the sense and progress of Latin American reason. The question is not directed to and by the being of the Latin American (as for Mayz Vallenilla) or toward the normative foundations of modernity that have impeded the development of Latin American philosophy.62 Rather, the question concerns the epistemic-social practices that make possible the construction of the Latin American, the Western, and the European as objects of knowledge and points of organization for the articulation of realities.63 A crucial point in this question is that here thinking is not pre-situated by a given difference; it is the difference that is in question (how are specific questions and modes of knowledge determined? How are the lines of difference drawn? How is a discourse of center-periphery constituted and sustained?) Moreover, this thinking turns to philosophical practices that in themselves cannot remain unquestioned or situated by a rationalist claim to logic and objectivity outside of the reality in which thought arises. Finally, here the binary system of the Western over and against the other and its distinctness disappears as the question of philosophical thought, and a space of thought in radical exteriority arises in light of exposures to loss and transformation that always put the very originary movement of differentiation into play and in question. This is why Castro-Gómez concludes that in this questioning one finds a line of fugue with respect to the epistemic situation from which the ones and the others had been presenting themselves the problem: both sides persisted in questioning the access of Latin America to modernity, without noticing that both categories ‘Latin American’ and ‘modernity,’ did not denote absolutely anything outside of the symbolic order from which they were constructed.64

When Castro-Gómez responds to the question of the practices that sustain modern rationalism in Latin American thought, he shows that the meta-narratives that develop in the nineteenth century about Latin American identity sustain and work together with the unfolding of modernity, so that groups and individuals could function and recognize themselves “in their social practices, their perceptions, and interactions.”65 The narratives become a fixed point from which orientation may be taken with regard to building a common memory, a sense of history, and a cultural identity that ultimately serves the criollo project of the development of nation states.66 In short, Latin American philosophy is sustained by a question constructed through narratives in the nineteenth century. What before could be sought as Latin American identity, or even liberation, under the

166 | Thinking from Radical Exteriority guise of authentic Latin American experience turns out to be imaginary. Sharing the certainty gained from those modern narratives, Latin American philosophies that search for freedom in light of what is properly Latin American (lo propio) continue to speak under the project ordered by a teleology of progress and production and by rationally comprehensible determinations of spaces of knowledge and possibilities of existence. Castro-Gómez turns to Garcia-Marquez: Like in García-Márquez’s story, Latinoamericanism serves the same function of Pilar Ternera’s cards or the memory machine of Arcadio Buendía: to establish an order of signification that would secure continuity and regularity of history, that could reestablish the correspondence between words and things.67

Unlike in Quijano’s case, Marquez’s story is not a mythical moment but the exposure of a movement in Latin American thought that sustains the coloniality of power and knowledge and the coloniality of time from inside Latin American discourses of liberation. This is, however, not a call for the dismissal of previous thought but rather a recognition of a continuous danger one finds at the limit of giving philosophical determination to senses of being and forms of experience. The correspondence between words and things “establishes an order of signification that secures the continuity and regularity of history,” and with it, of the coloniality of power and knowledge.68 The problem is that if taken as a given, this continuity leaves distinctness and the simultaneous non-simultaneity of modernity in our time to oblivion. “The theoretical discourses about the ‘national,’ and the ‘Latin American’ played precisely in consonance with this aim: transmitting to citizens the impression of recognizing themselves in a ‘common fiction’ that synthesized the contradictions of race, gender, age, and sexual orientation.”69

Fugue: Hybrid Thinking, from Identity to Radical Exteriority Castro-Gómez’s thought does not end in the exposure of the limits of Latin American reason or philosophy; it only begins there. As he writes in his Critique, “modern rationality cannot be reduced to a single and teleological process, but it must be understood as a heterogeneous dynamic.”70 Here Castro-Gómez’s thought echoes our own discussion in the last chapter concerning the inseparability of Latin American concrete disseminating and ana-chronic life and modernity. As the philosopher points out, “In Latin America the modern has never replaced the traditional.”71 Modernity’s instrumental rationalism is but a form of the rational, which now, in light of the analysis we have followed, appears as “a complex plot of orderings, reappropriations, and interpretations of different types of rationalities.”72 To be rational is to begin from the fluid and dense situation that is modernity when taken in its complex and fecund measure, that is, always already in the overwhelming movement that violates any attempt to put a single name and measure over life. Here Castro-Gómez finds an exemplary way of engaging our situ-

Modernity and Rationality | 167 ation in Néstor García Canclini’s sense of hybrid cultures.73 Indeed, Castro-Gómez—as example of his understanding of hybrid thought—cites García Canclini’s treatment of modern art through the breaking up of the binary set or difference between myth and logos. Latin American art, as much in its materials as in its form, constitutes an example of the rupture with this myth of the romantic and the enlightened. Modernist painting in the thirties (Diego Rivera in Mexico, Tarcilia do Amaral and Emiliano Di Cavalcanti in Brasil, Antonio Berni in Argentina) constitutes in itself a hybrid configuration combining modern formal elements (cubism, impressionism, expressionism) with traditional autochthonous motives; . . . the affirmation of new esthetic tendencies does not disagree at all with the putting in the scene of Pre-Columbian Mexico, peasant life, events of the revolution.74

Latin America’s reality is modern and rational, but neither of these terms is grounded on the expected progress and ordering of the coloniality of power and knowledge and its historical and temporal system or epistemic prejudices. Moreover, here “culture” no longer refers to its traditional sense, that is, to the rational mediation of nature that produces meanings in terms of rational normative institutions and the single history that orients such progress. If anything may be said to introduce culture, it is that he is speaking of lo desmesurado, the living experiencing of configurations of lives and their sense from and with radical exteriority. It is in this sense of a radical, fluid articulation of lives in their distinct, articulate configurations that I would understand the aesthetic sense of radical exteriority as well as the processes and experiences that constitute art, literature, and thought. A last implication follows, namely, that philosophy becomes an experience inseparable from an originary exposure to radical exteriority in its physicality and unbridled movement. Or in other words, the aesthetic dimension of philosophical thought begins to surface, not from conceptual knowledge above difference but from the undergoing of the aesthetic distinctness in which thought arises. With these observations we touch once again on the aesthetic character of liberation and decolonial philosophies, now as it begins to become apparent beyond Western modern instrumental rationalism and its culture of re-presentation and representation of culture. As the examples just cited point out, and as we saw above, hybrid thinking means opening philosophy to ways of thinking that no longer remain situated by the binary logic of modernity and the various expectations and limitations that accompany rationalist instrumental thought. Castro-Gómez’s analysis leads him to recognize a hybrid thought that engages the little histories and the transversal identities excluded by the grand narrative of a single development of history, rationality, and human consciousness or spirit. As we saw in his discussion of postmodern thought, the critique always bears historical contingencies that encounter our conceptual delimitations of thought and in which thought meets its limits.

168 | Thinking from Radical Exteriority Thus, thinking and philosophy find themselves through engaging experience and life, and neither thought nor experience is a matter of a continuous progression under rationality. Instead, in remaining with Castro-Gómez’s thought, one finds a time-space of non-simultaneous simultaneity, of ana-chronisms, interruptions, encounters, discontinuities, transformations, and mutations, which assemble into configurations of meanings and forms of life. If for Kant experience required reason, for Castro-Gómez modern rationality occurs in light of hybrid experiences, and in his thinking he remains with the dense and fecund intersections in which and through which rationality takes its place through living configurations.75 Given this shift, the rational becomes a space for narratives unexpected by the rationalist modern project, and sense is only that which arises from undergoing the distinctness in and as which thinking occurs. According to normative rational teleology, such experience in difference should be shapeless, amorphous nonsense awaiting reason’s synthesis. However, as we have seen, life does not wait for reason, but reason arises in the hybrid movement of modern life. The living, dense, and fecund movement of life is the site from which one may begin to concretely engage Latin American and modern philosophy from radical exteriority and in the awareness of the distinctness from which one speaks—at the limit of sense and on the way to languages and forms of lives found in hybrid crossings.76 I would like to close this section with a double warning concerning hybrid thinking. First of all, the hybrid thinking we are discussing does not ask for the abandonment of identities but, on the contrary for the intensification of one’s engagement with the living temporality that situates and in which identities take form and pass away. Second—and this is an issue that is at the heart of this book— the sense of hybrid thinking in radical exteriority is never limited to the sum of its pragmatic and historical facts. To think in radical exteriority means to engage a transformative movement that is not equal to the historical situation and its subjects and normative strictures. This has been said best by Alberto Moreiras in his critical appraisal of theories of hybrid thinking in The Exhaustion of Difference: As Hybridity moves through the power-knowledge machine toward its particular form of conceptual closure, it keeps us from understanding that the world is something more, and other than, the sum of its subjects: in other words, that a politics of subjectivity does not exhaust politics all together. I want to propose a particular understanding, or critique, of hybridity: . . . relational subalternism. By that I mean an understanding of the subaltern position in merely formal terms, as that which stands outside any given hegemonic articulation at any given time.77

At the limit of hybrid thinking and beyond it, I close this chapter on the way to engaging a number of other contemporary philosophers who in their articulations of Latin American experiences remain hybrid in the sense of thinking in a manner outside any given hegemonic articulation at any given time, thus always playing out the senses of identity at the limit.

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The Underside of Postmodernity and the Difficulty of the Articulation of Distinctness In order to clearly understand the opening toward the affirmation of distinct singularities in their hybrid registers, one must recognize how the coloniality of power and knowledge operates today with relation to the affirmation of differences.78 Indeed, in recognizing critically the concrete, distinct situation of Latin American experiences, one finds the coloniality of power and knowledge with its epistemic prejudice still at work, in spite of the deconstruction of Western master narratives and the dissolution of state sovereignty and state-centered economies. Castro-Gómez shows this in his essay “The Missing Chapter of Empire: Postmodern Reorganization of Coloniality and Post-Fordist Capitalism.”79 As the Colombian thinker explains, following Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s thesis in their book Empire, the postmodern critique within the West shows that world order has shifted and expanded. In an early stage the nation-state and its sovereignty serve as normative institutions that sustain capitalist control of labor and production. However, as the production of value expands from material control that organizes production to a world economy based on information, the sovereign state loses its purpose as the principal manner of controlling the expansion of capital. In the post-Fordist age, what is of highest value is knowledge, and knowledge does not have a geopolitical situation (this in contrast to the Fordist manipulation and control of bodies and materials for the sake of the production of capital). In other words, without the reference to bodies and raw material, there is no longer an inside and outside that may serve to identify center and periphery, the place of power and its outside. Instead, today each subject becomes “human capital,” that is, an agent of knowledge, a producer of information.80 With this shift one finds that the normalizing model no longer works in the same way. Whereas in the early stages of capitalism, normalization concerns the suppression of difference for the sake of the homogeneous control of the labor-producing population (as Foucault has extensively shown), now difference, the individual’s production of singular knowledge, becomes the commodity to be developed and sustained. “Sustainable development” of singularity replaces normative homogeneity: the singular locus becomes the site of production of knowledge/value, identities without borders and the affirmation of difference becomes a principal element in world economy.81 Seen from a Eurocentric perspective, this shift may seem to end the coloniality of power and knowledge, since bodies (at least at the level of information trade) are no longer enslaved and since now differences are not only accepted but encouraged and sustained. However, as Castro-Gómez shows, this sense of living in a postmodern world in which distinctness has become possible is a mere fiction that covers over the pernicious transformation of the coloniality of power and knowledge.

170 | Thinking from Radical Exteriority Castro-Gómez goes on to critique empire by reminding us of the coloniality of power and knowledge that is the underside of modernity and that, in spite of the transformation, still operates. If difference has become acceptable and encouraged for its value, the epistemic factor of the determination of that value remains the same. The epistemic prejudice that holds Western technological and calculative knowledge and that sustains capitalist development is still the determining factor in giving value, recognizing difference, and ordering its sustainability. Castro-Gómez offers a keen example: the development of sustainable projects for biodiversity that serve the expansion of the pharmaceutical industry at a planetary level.82 The example he offers concerns the extraction of biological material by indigenous Latin American peoples. Castro-Gómez writes: Non-occidental knowledge is welcomed to the global agendas of Empire because it is useful to the capitalist project of biodiversity . . . diversity is useful for the reproduction of capital. The indigenous person, for example, is no longer seen as someone pertaining to the social, economic, and cognitive past of humanity, but as the ‘guardian of biodiversity.’83

He goes on to add, “The ‘recognition’ that is given to non-occidental systems of knowledge is pragmatic rather than epistemic.”84 First of all, the areas or environments that contain the desired biological materials are recognized as human patrimony and therefore are subject to majors that will secure their preservation. What follows is the extraction of the specific biological agents, which is then put to use by the Western multinational biological industry. In such cases the preservation and sustaining of distinct cultures refers only to the preservation of information that may be put to use by technology for the sake of capital expansion. At least two aspects of coloniality may remain invisible if one takes the sustainable strategies that apply to these indigenous cultures at face value, as a recognition and embracing of difference. But in following Castro-Gómez’s essay at the heart of this example, at least two unchanging characteristics of the coloniality of power and knowledge may be seen at work. One, the wealth produced by the medical-biological industry does not return to the indigenous cultures but is accumulated by the now-ubiquitous capitalist machinery.85 Two, the information is taken without any regard for local knowledge concerning the biological elements. As Castro-Gómez dramatically indicates, “No dialogue between a biologist trained at Harvard and a shaman from Putumayo is possible, only what amounts to a ‘transfer’ of knowledge in one direction.”86 In other words, the epistemic prejudice that maintains that Western instrumental rationalism is more advanced and that indigenous knowledge is a thing of the past still remains intact. In light of Castro-Gómez’s essay, one sees that in speaking of hybrid experiences and radical simultaneous and asymmetrical temporalities, one must be clear about the elements in distinct lives and experiences that may be incorporated into the coloniality of power and knowledge in the name of recognizing

Modernity and Rationality | 171 them in their difference. This means that in seeking to articulate distinct knowledge and experiences, one must be clear about the way in which distinctness is recognized, from the praxis and function of the locus of enunciation to the parameters that determine the possibilities and value of the distinct as knowledge. This requires a constant critical awareness regarding the limits of affirmation in the determination of hybrid and distinct identities, with respect to the constant operation of the coloniality of power and knowledge, its epistemic prejudices, and time-space coordinates. Ultimately, as Castro-Gómez puts it, thinking from and with the distinctness of Latin American experiences will always require critique or the making visible of the invisible operation of coloniality. To say it again in terms of Castro-Gómez’s argument, I take this to involve one’s awareness of the lack of an epistemic plurality and the need for epistemological democracy.87

9

Thinking in Remarkable Distinctness Decolonial Thought in Some Key Figures in Contemporary Latin American Philosophy La actualidad pide, reclama, un pensamiento decolonial que articule genealogías desperdigadas por el planeta, y ofrezca modalidades económicas, políticas, y subjetivas “otras.” Actuality asks for, demands, a decolonial thought that articulates genealogies disseminated throughout the planet, and that offers “other” economic, political, and subjective modalities. —Walter Mignolo

These opening words from Walter Mignolo’s essay “Decolonial Thought: Detachment and Opening (A Manifesto)” capture the fluid and disseminating movement from which and toward which the thought of Dussel, Quijano, and CastroGómez have led us.1 In light of the previous chapters, we are faced with the challenge to think in other ways than those sustained by instrumental rationalism and the coloniality of power, knowledge, and time. In this chapter I first reintroduce the idea of hybrid thinking in Castro-Gómez in order to set up and gain access to the relevance and impact of three contemporary Latin American philosophers. These thinkers situate their thought at the crossing of distinct ways of thinking out of their situation in fluid and distinct ana-chronic simultaneity of discourses and lives. I begin my discussion of these thinkers with Walter Mignolo’s sense of modernity as a time-space of “decolonial difference.” I will then move to two other figures who, in their particular ways and out of their specific situations and histories, develop conceptual narratives that articulate decolonial moments in philosophy today: Nelson Maldonado-Torres and María Lugones. In each case I will limit my discussion to specific moments, well aware that each of these figures would deserve much more extensive and in-depth discussion, both with respect to their own theories and developments as well as in relation to the figures, movements, and ideas we have discussed in previous chapters. Therefore, I offer this chapter merely as a brief introduction to these few contemporary Latin American thinkers and to the distinct ways in which each inhabits the radical exteriority and ana-chronic character of Latin American experiences.

172

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Hybrid Experiences and Philosophical Thought Santiago Castro-Gómez’s hybrid thinking may easily be interpreted as the abandonment of the radical exteriority we have been discussing. How could exteriority be understood beyond the binary logic of the world-system theory that underlies philosophy of liberation? However, the recognition of hybridity and of today’s situation is precisely a recognition of a modernity situated in its distinct and diverse ana-chronic movements, senses of existence, and forms of life. This is not the amorphous overlapping of meaningless worlds and life forms but the broad spectrum of relations in which modernity and rationality may be seen in their broad and fecund possibilities. Beyond binary alterity, life appears inseparably from the manifestations of beings and their meanings. When binary divisions are given up, the traditional divisions between fields of study are also transgressed. Once the traditional epistemic delimitation of possibilities of knowledge is undone, modes of knowledge and narratives that had been dismissed enter into play. The recognition of the latter requires that one cross over previously determined fields of possible knowledge, since often it is only by crossing over and violating the traditional limits of philosophy, the social sciences, aesthetics, or literature that ana-chronic movements, senses of existence, and forms of life may be understood (that is, withstood and undergone). In the engagement of one’s fluid reality, one’s delimitations may be put in check and called to mutate, adapt, transform, or become undone. At times one must begin to speak again. In terms of philosophical knowledge this affects a particularly crucial aspect of the coloniality of thought, namely—to use the title of a brilliant work by Castro-Gómez—The Hubris of Point Zero.2 This term refers to the way the ego cogito, the rational subject in its judgment, situates itself outside and beyond that which it situates, thus effecting change and controlling, manipulating, life while remaining untouched by it. This transcendental position is not rational, inasmuch as nothing may justify the judging, and once thinking has removed itself from contingency, it becomes a sovereign power over all life and yet untouched by that which it manipulates and produces as it sees fit. One clear contemporary example of this colonizing position is those philosophers who assume that it is unreasonable to ask thinkers to engage their situation in order to better understand the ideas and questions they raise and use as a critical apparatus. Such assumption repeats the famous Cartesian separation of mind and body, only now in the guise of the history-reason problem. This binary structure, however, is sustained precisely by a false dichotomy constructed by taking thought out of living experience. Once the ego cogito recedes into its transcendental abode, thinking becomes rational theory, and this rationalist thinking becomes the systems and values, the ideas and definitions, that must be applied to its other: to life, the uncivilized, the irrational, the body, desire, emotion, women, children, and all peoples of color. In its claim to be grounded on thinking outside history, rationalism situates itself in

174 | Thinking from Radical Exteriority a point zero, from which it sustains its power over all other narratives and forms of lives. I am speaking of contemporary philosophers (the reader may recognize his or her own experience) and of a danger that remains latent in philosophy because philosophers do think abstractly. In light of the situating of thought in its present circumstance, however, and by breaking the binary code of instrumental rationalism and its epistemic prejudice, we are now aware of these power dynamics. This means that we may challenge them when they appear and, more importantly, that we may keep our thinking in check by remaining conscious of the limits every philosopher and thinker constantly faces. For those who remain entrenched in the binary system, Castro-Gómez, Mignolo, and the other thinkers discussed in this section will remain outside philosophy and will be assigned other fields of study according to traditional epistemic limits. They are therefore recognized as social theorists, sociologists, students of comparative literature, or scholars of ethnic studies. These are the places in which one finds decolonial philosophers today in most of the academy. Engaging the dynamic anachronisms and movements of modernity and rationality in radical exteriority is a matter of a sensibility that relentlessly keeps itself exposed to its limits. Moreover, the way we engage experience also changes. One begins from experience, and in doing so one is called to follow the movements in which meanings and forms of lives are constituted. Such thinking does not begin from already given concepts in order to identify experience, and experience does not repeat concepts already operative and fitting to normative structures constructed under the binary thinking sustained by the coloniality of power and knowledge. The issue is to think in critical engagement with the movement from which meanings and forms of life arise. The issue is not Being with a capital B or an originary givenness of meanings but rather what Castro-Gómez calls a critical ontology of the present (see chapter 8). What is in question is the movement of thought in which meanings are configured and take flight. This does not only require questioning already operative discourses; that would be mere critique. The point is that in engaging in a critical ontology of the present the dense overlapping of levels of consciousness and experience become apparent in their possible roles in the unfolding of consciousness, thought, and rational determinations of the meanings of beings. This complex relation of thought to itself that arises from experience to find its way back to experience occurs as a thinking situated at the living point, rather than at the zero point, of thought. The “living point” is the living situation in which one finds oneself: concrete life in its density, complexity, and fecund differences and dynamic determinations of identities and senses of beings. One begins, then, from and in those spaces in which epistemic possibilities and horizons begin to arise. The dynamic overlapping of meanings and forms of lives, the encounters and mutations, the going under and rising of life as meaning and humanity, constitute specific and concrete experi-

Thinking in Remarkable Distinctness | 175 ences and practices that define epistemic spaces. Moreover, as we heard in the closing of the last chapter, thought is always already moving beyond the fact of history and its material subjective determination. Can thinking remain with such dynamic situation? As we will see in the next sections, this is the challenge taken up by a number of contemporary Latin American philosophers. I begin with Walter Mignolo’s sense of “the colonial difference,” a concept that he develops by remaining with the movement we have just been discussing and that results in an opening for situating thought in the time-space of radical exteriority and ana-chronic simultaneity in terms of dynamic epistemic structures.

“The Colonial Difference”: Thought Situated in the Ana-Chronic Simultaneity of Meanings and Lives As we saw in our previous chapters, on the one hand, for Enrique Dussel liberation is grounded in the exteriority of the periphery. On the other hand, for Quijano such exteriority becomes impossible since the other is always the result of an historical process rooted in the system. Moreover, the possibility of a hybrid knowledge as articulated by Castro-Gómez puts in question the way both Dussel and Quijano attempt to articulate Latin American reality through a binary thinking that repeats modern rationalist instrumentalism and its way of interpreting existence. By contrast, Castro-Gómez seems to call for a postmodern thinking that may even obstruct the path for liberation sought by Dussel: While the latter does not question his presupposed position as he calls for the recognition of the excluded subjects, the former may be seen as remaining attached to a theoretical rather than practical project of critique and deconstruction of rationalism, which ultimately risks becoming an obstacle for the concrete articulation of Latin American lives. It is Walter Mignolo, with his development of the idea of the colonial difference, who brings together these insights and introduces a way of thinking from the dense space we have gradually uncovered in our discussions. In the preface to Local Histories/Global Designs, Mignolo writes: “The colonial difference is the space where coloniality of power is enacted.”3 Mignolo engages Latin American reality by situating his analysis within the dynamic space in which the coloniality of power and knowledge occurs. He does this by tracing a geopolitical spatial path that, unlike the historical linear analysis, makes evident the overlapping and borders of what otherwise would seem totally separate realities.4 This is not a study about Latin America but from the site of enunciation of Latin American thought and in light of the movement that constitutes such enunciations. As Mignolo points out in his preface to The Darker Side of Western Modernity (2011): “The point, however, is not where you reside but where you dwell.”5 Thinking from the colonial difference involves not a fixed geopolitical place (as in the center-periphery format of world-system theory) but a consciousness of the fluid geopolitical space-time that marks knowing and inter-subjectiv-

176 | Thinking from Radical Exteriority ity under the coloniality of power and knowledge. In recognizing this fluid spacetime, Mignolo follows Dussel’s sense of radical exteriority (by virtue of which other narratives than that of the colonial power may be heard), and at the same time he acknowledges that the distinctness recognized by Dussel is not totally exterior to the coloniality of power and knowledge, nor is it wholly determined by it. Thus, the colonial difference appears as the site constituted by the coloniality of power and knowledge and at the same time as the site in which—in tensions with the central narrative as well as in resistance and transgression of it—other narratives become apparent. Developing further the sentence from Local Histories/Global Designs I just quoted, Mignolo explains: It [the colonial difference] is the space where the restitution of subaltern knowledge is taking place and where border thinking is emerging. The colonial difference is the space where local histories inventing and implementing global designs meet local histories, i.e., the space in which global designs have to be adapted, adopted, rejected, integrated, or ignored. The colonial difference is, finally, the physical as well as imaginary location where the coloniality of power is at work in the confrontation of two kinds of local histories displayed in different spaces and times across the planet.6

We find here a series of moments that must be discerned and analyzed. The colonial difference forms a physical and imaginary space (in the sense of projections of meanings and existence as, for example, charted in Orientalism).7 This space is configured by the construction of a world system along the lines we found in Quijano’s analysis. One distinctive aspect of this system is that it conceals its other side, its dark side. This dark side operates in a double manner: Western thought appropriates other knowledge, and it dismisses what does not serve its rationalist-instrumental project. Therefore, thinking in the space of the colonial difference means both recognizing the racial epistemic prejudice and the system of power and knowledge that sustains modernity while at the same time becoming aware of the place and force of other modes of knowledge and forms of life that serve to sustain and further the system in the past and present. We find here an internal tension between exclusion and resistance, between totalizing narratives and alternative narratives that transgress and may even dismiss the main totalizing discourses and determinations of knowledge. Thus, the colonial difference is the space where the restitution of excluded and buried modes of knowledge and forms of lives may occur. The restitution of knowledge occurs within the colonial world system, in spite of the system, and in a movement that exposes and arises from modes of knowledge that are not determined by the system. The break occurs because, as Mignolo understands it, the situation from which one speaks in the colonial world system, by virtue of that very colonial history, is the site of a broken enunciation, or the “fractured locus of enunciation.” Already in 1992, in an article that with its very title marks the double sense of the colonial difference, “Semiosis Colonial: la

Thinking in Remarkable Distinctness | 177 dialéctica entre representaciones fracturadas y hermenéuticas pluritópicas” (“Colonial Semiosis: The Dialectic Between Fractured Representations and Pluritopical Hermeneutics”), Mignolo writes about the double sense of coloniality as the space of “the fracture of the object or subject that attempts to understand and the implied fracture of the discourse and the position of the subject of understanding.”8 Elaborating on the positive sense on this situation, in Local Histories/ Global Designs Mignolo writes: The colonial difference creates the conditions for dialogic situations in which a fractured enunciation is enacted from the subaltern perspective as a response to the hegemonic discourse and perspective. Thus, border thinking is more than a hybrid enunciation. It is a fractured enunciation in dialogue with the territorial and hegemonic cosmology (e.g. ideology, perspective).9

As is clear from the last sentence, the colonial difference happens as the encounter and encroachment of distinct narratives and lives, not as a mixing in which identities are lost to a general progress. Thus, thinking arises from the fractured locus of enunciation, from the physical and discursive experience of being in between cultures, histories, narratives, and ways of engaging existence and articulating meanings. This way of being and thinking remains situated in histories and traditions that are always in tension with the colonial world system. Mignolo writes: “‘Nepantla,’ a word coined by Nahuatl speakers in the second half of the sixteenth century, is another example. ‘To be or feel in between,’ as the word could be translated into English, was possible in the mouth of an Amerindian, not of a Spaniard.”10 This is not a claim to a discourse that excludes modernity but rather to one that recognizes a distinct way of being occurring within the modern colonial world system in a distinct manner, a way of being that cannot be resolved or put to work by the system. At the same time, this break in enunciation marks a break in the system’s narrative or discourse. Living and discursive reality interrupt and transgress the coloniality of power and knowledge from within. Mignolo calls this thinking in the colonial difference “border thinking” or “border gnosis.”11 He concludes: “At the end of the twentieth century, border thinking can no longer be controlled and it offers new critical horizons to the limitations of critical discourses within hegemonic cosmologies (such as Marxism, deconstruction, world system analysis, or post-modern theories).”12 The colonial difference recognizes the radical exteriority operative within the coloniality of power and knowledge and figures a space for transformative thinking about modernity, the forms of lives, narratives, and dispositions that make up our spaces of thought, and the possibilities for philosophy today. In order to better grasp Mignolo’s sense of knowledge and its possibilities, we must pause for a moment to discuss border thinking, or border gnosis. As Mignolo explains, the word “gnosis” refers to knowledge (gignosko) which encompasses a much wider range of modes of knowledge than the one domi-

178 | Thinking from Radical Exteriority nated by the epistemic frame created by the coloniality of power and knowledge. Referring to Valentin Y. Mudimbe’s use of the word “gnosis” in his book The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy, and the Order of Knowledge, Mignolo explains, “Mudimbe used the word gnosis to capture a wide range of forms of knowledge that ‘philosophy’ and ‘epistemology’ contributed to cast away.”13 As we saw in earlier chapters, the coloniality of power and knowledge sets up the parameters and dispositions for philosophical knowledge. As Mignolo points out, although in Greek thought episteme (knowledge) and doxa (opinion) are distinguishable but inseparable, the modern turn to instrumental rationalism and its production project sets up two possible spaces for episteme, severed from doxa: secularized hermeneutics and epistemology, the first referring to the interpretation of human existence and the second to the sciences. As a result other modes of knowledge become suspicious when not meaningless for modern progress, and therefore past as well as present modes of knowledge and cultures become subaltern. Mudimbe’s use of “gnosis” brings back a much wider sense of knowledge: “Mudimbe notes, it means ‘seeking to know, inquiry, methods of knowing, investigation, and even acquaintance with someone.’”14 Thus, “border gnosis” refers to the recognition of the covering over and dismissal of those modes of knowledge as well as to their possible recognition and incorporation into the way one thinks today. This resurfacing and creative reappropriation of spaces of knowledge occurs by virtue of a radical eruption of the subaltern, in the sense that it occurs from outside the already established epistemic spaces of knowledge and their set categories: “Border gnosis as knowledge from the subaltern perspective is knowledge conceived from the exterior borders of the modern/colonial world system.”15 Mignolo then introduces “border gnoseology,” which is the critical encounter of colonial knowledge with the subaltern. As a discourse about colonial knowledge border gnoseology is conceived at the conflicting intersection of the knowledge produced from the perspective of modern colonialisms (rhetoric, philosophy, science) and knowledge produced from the perspective of colonial modernities in Asia, Africa, and the Americas/Caribbean. Border gnoseology is a critical reflection on knowledge production from both the interior borders of the modern/colonial world system (imperial conflicts, hegemonic language, directionality of translations, etc.) and its exterior borders (imperial conflicts with cultures being colonized, as well as the subsequent stages of independence and decolonization).16

By thinking not as much in terms of temporality but rather in the recognition of borders as spaces, Mignolo is able to expose the fluid and dynamic space of configurations of meanings, encounters, encroachments, and transformative appropriations. Neither outside nor inside, neither Western nor non-Western, neither civilized nor barbaric, the logic of knowledge becomes a knowledge of negotiations and transformations, of contaminations and disseminations that make it

Thinking in Remarkable Distinctness | 179 impossible to situate knowledge in one time or space, autonomous and untouched by its pluritopic and plurivalent contexts. Referring to his book as a whole, Mignolo concludes: That long process of subalternization of knowledge is being radically transformed by new forms of knowledge in which what has been subalternized and considered interesting only as object of study becomes articulated as new loci of enunciation. This is the second thesis of the book. The first is explored through a cultural critique of historical configurations; the second by looking at the emergence of new loci of enunciation, by describing them as ‘border gnosis’ and by arguing that ‘border gnosis’ is the subaltern reason striving to bring to the foreground the force and creativity of knowledge subalternized during a long process of colonization of the planet, which was at the same time the process in which modernity and the modern Reason were constructed.17

Border gnosis or border thinking does not only expose us to the overlapping of modes of knowledge; it also recognizes that this ana-chronic movement occurs through a fractured locus that, in its fracture, bears the displacement of modern, colonial knowledge and its epistemic paradigms. Knowledge becomes now a matter of new loci of enunciation, and these are not seen as autonomous, selfsufficient, and removed from contingency and experience. On the contrary, every locus is a fractured space of enunciation, already open and exposed in radical exteriority. As Mignolo himself points out, he develops this sense of exposure earlier in his works, when he speaks of “colonial semiosis” and “pluritopic hermeneutics.”18 Both terms refer to engaging transculturation in terms of the way signs limit, delimit, transgress, and disseminate modes of knowledge from the construction of the coloniality of power and knowledge to date. People’s lives, their meanings, take place through signs; at the same time, in the recognition of the way those signs operate, meanings and the situating of peoples’ lives and narratives are constantly undone and reconfigured. The recognition of the realm of language as the space in which meanings occur finds a crucial corollary in the term “pluritopic hermeneutics.” This term indicates that the transformation and dissemination of signs does not occur as a monolingual act but that every transformation is a matter of conflict: “In any event, pluritopic hermeneutics was necessary to indicate that colonial semiosis ‘takes place’ in between conflict of modes of knowledge and structures of power.”19 As we saw in Castro-Gómez’s discussion of a utopian space of thought, the basic utopic element is the sustaining of the space of confrontation, encroachment, transformation, and undoing, rather than the traditional hermeneutical search for a commonality without discontinuity. As Mignolo goes on to explain: “Colonial semiosis requires a pluritopic hermeneutics since in the conflict, in the cracks and fissures where the conflict originates, a description of one side of the epistemological divide won’t do.”20 Mignolo then goes on to drive the fundamental point home: “But that is not all, because while the first problem was to look into the spaces in between, the second

180 | Thinking from Radical Exteriority was how to produce knowledge from such in-between spaces.”21 As Mignolo points out, this examination of the space where modes of knowledge are produced is “border thinking.” Border thinking, as defined by Mignolo, “is the moment in which the imaginary of the modern world system cracks.”22 The recognition of pluritopic modes of knowledge undoes the claim to a central rationalist sense of existence and of the human. Moreover, with this recognition other narratives open up and become possible. Mignolo associates the way this break occurs with Foucault’s sense of the “insurrection of subjugated modes of knowledge,” which the French philosopher introduces in his lectures at the College de France in 1976.23 Subjugated modes of knowledge are systematically and formally buried, disguised and dismissed by the modern world system. What have been buried are not merely other meanings but forms of lives, the very emergence of historical contents or configurations of senses of lives in their concrete, dynamic events. Here appears a critical differentiation and transgression with respect to formal academic knowledge in the social sciences in particular as well as in philosophy. The insurrection of subjugated modes of knowledge occurs through the confrontation of academic modes of knowledge with non-academic modes of knowledge and forms of lives. In other words, we are speaking of the violent encounter of the already operative structures of knowledge and their allocation of life to specific fields of study, with other forms of lives and modes of knowledge that remain insurmountable and unaccounted for, if not excluded or reduced, by the operative modern, colonial world system. Mignolo explains this creative moment by going back to Foucault: Foucault was using the distinction between disciplinary and subjugated modes of knowledge to question the very foundation of academic/disciplinary and expert knowledge without which the very notion of subjugated knowledge would not have sense. He called genealogy the union of “erudite knowledge and local memories” and specified that what the genealogy really does is to ‘entertain the claims to attention of local, discontinuous, disqualified, illegitimate modes of knowledge against the claims of a unitary body of theory which would filter hierarchies and order them in the name of some true knowledge and some arbitrary idea if what constitutes a science and its objects.’24

In light of the insurrection of subjugated modes of knowledge, philosophy and the social sciences assume their place within the coloniality of power and knowledge in the modern, colonial world system. It is not the sign as understood by the institutionalized disciplines that may liberate but rather the lives and narratives that, although often constitutive of the first, have remained excluded and ignored by the operative systems of power and knowledge in their unquestioned places of discourse. As Mignolo writes in a recent article, “Decolonial thinking means engaging in knowledge-making and transformation at the edge, in and of, the discipline.”25 To say it in other words, as Ramón Grosfoguel has explained it: the difference in terms of Latin American thought would be between disciplines that

Thinking in Remarkable Distinctness | 181 talk about “Latin America” as an academic field of study and Latin American thinkers who articulate their situation from their concrete lives and toward them.26 I believe the accent at this point must be on the differentiation Foucault makes between “erudite knowledge and local memories.” What interrupts the established discourses, paradigms, epistemic fields, and modes of knowledge is life. Once again we may turn to Dussel’s clarity in identifying the concrete sense and sensibilities of people’s lives as the point that puts in check modern, colonial rationalism. We are speaking of memories that found and configure traditions and ways of understanding existence, which offer the leeway necessary for the creation of forms of lives and for temporal and spatial experiences that overflow modern rationalism. In “Decolonizing Western Epistemology/Building Decolonial Epistemologies,” Mignolo identifies the movement of this “insurrection” with decoloniality and the double movement we have found as the key element in engaging the colonial difference through border thinking. “Decoloniality is a double-faced concept. On one side, it points toward the analytic of coloniality, the darker side of modernity. On the other, it points towards building decolonial futures.”27 Here Mignolo’s insurrection turns toward the positive account of how such futures may be found. In other words, how does one negotiate being situated in the colonial difference? This is obviously a key issue, since it would not be sufficient to recognize the postmodern steps we found in Castro-Gómez and the dynamics of insurrection in border thinking without engaging how this movement happens. As Mignolo explains, the internal interruption of the system of domination occurs through what he terms “de-linking.”28 Going back to Quijano he reminds the reader that “decolonizing means to disengage (de-link) from Eurocentrism (once again not as a geography but as eurologocentrism), controlled by Western languages and institutions, since the renaissance, grounded in Greek and Latin as the ultimate linguistic ground in which epistemic categories are lodged.”29 But this separation from the by now somewhat classic image of Eurocentrism has further implications for Mignolo. He writes: To extricate oneself (to de-link from modernity/rationality) means to de-link from the right, the left, and liberation theology. It means simply that the decolonial option needs to be asserted in order to ‘extricate oneself’ not only from the imperial/dominating option but also from current Western liberating options such as Marxism and theology of liberation. Decolonizing epistemology means, in the long run, liberating thinking from sacralized texts, whether religious or secular.30

As Castro-Gómez has already indicated, decoloniality and Latin American thought figure a task that no longer follows the binary code that will replace one sacred narrative for another. Moreover, the site of decolonial border thinking is the concrete, living situation of distinct peoples, not the theoretical apparatus that offers recognition or representation.

182 | Thinking from Radical Exteriority To take seriously and act on the awareness that knowing responds to local needs (habits, memories) and that the politics of knowing is not in the clouds but rooted in the earth of geohistorical, bodily, racial, and patriarchal configurations (both of the individual and the community) means to take seriously the fact that in the ‘Third World’ (a racist classification that puts together people and regions of the planet [e.g. the Third World is inhabited by underdeveloped people]) needs and desires are not necessarily those that prompted the thoughts of modern, postmodern, and poststructuralist European thinkers.31

Here one does not await or attempt to enter the other’s historical and present discourse. To be recognized means now to remain with one’s colonial difference, negotiating that in-between in ways that let other narratives and forms of life reappear and be created. This is a thinking exposed to its life in the colonial difference and thus exposed to its limits. This exposure will require a constant and disciplined sensibility: “To argue in this direction requires a change of terrain; to move, first from a denotative to an enactive epistemology, and second, to move from a territorial to a border epistemology which presupposes an awareness of and a sensibility for the colonial difference.”32 We have followed the two moves carefully, from talking about to thinking from the concrete situation in its dynamic ana-chronic dissemination and from a binary geographical discourse to the mobile bordering that occurs in the time-spaces of the colonial difference. Furthermore, with the emphasis on life and sensibility we return to an issue that underlies all of the thinkers we have discussed. To say it in terms of our present discussion, we are speaking of the question of the aesthetic dimension of decolonial thought, of the sensibility that must accompany the very turning or engaging in thought through border gnosis or border thinking. I develop this issue in my introduction to thinking in terms of decolonial aesthetics in the next and final chapter. In light of our earlier discussion of the coloniality of time, before moving on, I should also point out one interesting development in Mignolo’s last work, published in 2011, The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options.33 In his chapter on temporality, Mignolo articulates the problem of the coloniality of time in a manner similar to our previous discussion. As he explains (echoing Quijano), underneath the racial division of the world lies a sense of temporality that puts the European ego cogito at the forefront of humanity’s development and future. The problem with this is that one may very well live under such disposition. “Based on a certain understanding of time and/or space, you may end up believing that you are behind in time: and if you believe so, you are more likely to want to catch up with modernity. If you fall into this trap, you have lost the game before beginning it.”34 As we discussed in previous chapters, this sense of temporality makes impossible the recognition of other modes of knowledge that are excluded, dismissed, and unacceptable to that specific time line.

Thinking in Remarkable Distinctness | 183 Mignolo recognizes that given the colonial difference, the unilinear sense of time is not the only way to understand reality—a point we saw clearly in our discussion of Quijano and simultaneous ana-chronic temporalities. Mignolo concludes: “Differential times and differential memories and histories are delinking from the belief that there is only one line of time; and this is a reasonable conclusion if one follows Christian or secular Hegelian time-linear narratives.”35 This de-linking, however, has particular significance for how one lives and finds determinations in one’s life. As Mignolo argues, global coloniality is supported by this coloniality of time, and “once you control (the idea of) time you can control subjectivity and make the many march to the rhythm of your own time.”36 Thus, the struggle for time becomes central to the point that, as Daniel Innerarity has suggested according to Mignolo, “chrono-politics displaces, today, the colonization of space with the colonization of time.”37 This struggle over time is accompanied by the ever-increasing sense of time as going faster: “Success is the companion of moving faster, coming in first, and being the winner.”38 The suggestion is not only that there is one temporality, but also that only those who keep up and are faster will survive.39 The question then is how one may de-link from such seemingly unavoidable pressure over our consciousness, as every act and decision—and one’s very disposition toward existence—responds to this sense of temporality. Mignolo writes: In view of the non-sense in which the survival of the faster unfolds, there is good reason to make a case for re-inscribing ‘tradition’ in the present and towards the future. . . . Tradition could hardly be co-opted by chrono-politics; for if tradition, which is slow by definition, gets faster, it is no longer tradition, but modern. And if that happens, modernity gets stripped and the logic of coloniality is unveiled. That means that next to (conflicting and coexisting) the postmodern acceleration of time and the lifestyle it engenders, decolonial thinking shall build arguments for the revival of “the de-acceleration of time,” revaluing what modernity valued with no other reason than to eliminate difference.40

These words indicate a concrete way in which de-linking and border-thinking may occur. Here tradition is not to be judged by modernity, nor is it possible to relate it simply to movements like modern fascism, since fascist aesthetics is defined by the acceleration of time through the development of machines. As Mignolo indicates, temporality is not unitary, and attentiveness to the distinct anachronic temporalities that contribute to the configuration of one’s life rhythms may be a way of de-linking. However, when this happens the implications in philosophical terms are profound. In recognizing ana-chronic temporalities one would undo the link between tradition and modernity, since the two temporalities would no longer be read from the modern accelerating single perspective. That means that the anthropos, who was also invented in the process of inventing the modern self, would assume delinking from the imperative to be human in the sense that Western modernity conceived humanitas. Once you delink there is no longer mo-

184 | Thinking from Radical Exteriority dernity and tradition, humanitas and anthropos, but only people who believe in modernity and tradition, and humanitas and anthropos.41

The de-linking in terms of temporality means a collapse of the coloniality of time. This is possible because Mignolo situates thinking within the colonial difference, and so distinct ana-chronic temporalities are no longer separated by exclusion but must be engaged in their coexisting movement. Moreover, with this collapse of the single temporal narrative, one may begin to engage temporality from the very movement of one’s life. One may contrast this living sense of temporalities with that of Mayz Vallenilla, for whom an unfinished sense of temporality situates Latin American consciousness and thereby forms a certain existential incapacity. Instead, Mignolo’s analysis leads us to inhabit our experience as the fractured locus, in a border thinking that exposes us to the radical distinctness that makes decolonial thought possible by exposing us to alternative forms of rationality, forms of life, and temporalities. Indeed, as Simón Bolívar pointed out long ago, the Latin American situation is a strange one, but the path we have followed leads us to openings toward new ways of thinking born from the lives and times, the memories and narratives, of a humanity that begins to appear in a concrete fecundity.

Thinking in the Colonial Difference: Two Cases In “Decolonizing Western Epistemology/Building Decolonial Epistemologies,” Mignolo identifies, among others, two thinkers that are in dialogue with his work and the epistemic transformations it entails, Nelson Maldonado-Torres and María Lugones. They widen the opening Mignolo creates for philosophy, expanding in their own creative way on thinking in radical exteriority.42 I take as a leading indication of the works we will engage this sentence from a figure we will discuss in the next chapter, Nelly Richard, who writes in “Cultural Peripheries: Latin America and Post-Modernist De-Centering”: To escape from the control of the centrist signature and to destabilize its power of autoreferentiality are strategies to be undertaken by the deviant/devious (desviante) resources of the peripheral citation, of the fragment mobilized by a situational politics of critical re-signification of the very operation of cultural transfer.43

The Coloniality of Concrete Living Beings: The Cry at the Beginning of Thought from the Colonial Difference In his essay “On the Coloniality of Being: Contributions to the Development of a Concept,” Nelson Maldonado-Torres takes up the concrete experience of the subjugated lives under the coloniality of power and knowledge. For him their existence and sense are at the heart of the colonial difference and fundamental for decoloniality.44 Maldonado-Torres recognizes those lives by developing and

Thinking in Remarkable Distinctness | 185 deepening our sense of the “coloniality of being.”45 He follows Dussel’s and Quijano’s analyses when he makes the connection between the concept of Being in Western philosophy and the development of colonialism with respect to the coloniality of power and knowledge.46 As Maldonado-Torres writes: Coloniality of being would make primary reference to the lived experience of colonization and its impact on language . . . the ‘coloniality of being’ responds to the need to thematize the question of the effect of coloniality in lived experience and not only in the mind.47

The thematization and exposure of the existence of those under the colonial difference results from Maldonado-Torres’s rethinking the colonial difference in light of Frantz Fanon’s thought. “If Dussel spells out the historical dimension of the coloniality of being, Fanon deploys the existential expression of coloniality in relation to the colonial experience in its racial and, to some extent, gender dimension.”48 As is clear in his book Against War: Views from the Underside of Modernity, Maldonado Torres’s work develops in light of Fanon’s existential insight, around the concept of les damnés, the wretched of the earth (a central concept we have already used throughout our discussion).49 Maldonado-Torres articulates the coloniality of being in light of Fanon’s writings on trauma. As we will see, in bringing forth the concept of the coloniality of being he gives weight and presence to the excluded and subjugated bodies and modes of knowledge from within the colonial difference. This results in new paths for thought beyond the modern, colonial system and its philosophies. As Maldonado-Torres explains, the racial and epistemic prejudice that sustains the coloniality of power and knowledge is expressed in concrete form in the existence of racialized and gendered bodies. What makes possible this subjugation of lives is a fundamental suspicion at the heart of the modern, colonial gaze toward its other. “The barbarian was a racialized self, and what characterized this racialization was a radical question or permanent suspicion regarding the humanity of the self in question.”50 Maldonado-Torres concludes that as a result of this we may see that the self-certainty of the ego cogito is grounded not only in the construction of the other, as we saw in Quijano, but in a permanent doubt or skepticism concerning the very being or existence of the other. Maldonado-Torres characterizes this fundamental approach toward the existence of the colonized as “racist/imperial Manichean misanthropic skepticism.”51 This skepticism leads to the classification of, on the one hand, those who exist and are self-assured about their existence even when they may question its origin and reasons (the conquerors) and, on the other hand, those who question their own existence and therefore are non-existent, or at least inferior and suited for lives unacceptable to those who have being. As we saw in Quijano, this differentiation is naturalized and also leads to a naturalized ethics of war. That is, war, famine, suffering, torture, an-

186 | Thinking from Radical Exteriority nihilation, and exclusion (which are unacceptable for those who unquestionably partake in being)—all of these degrading, destructive, and unethical experiences and treatments—become possible and natural for those whose being is in question. Thus, the colonized become the naturally damned of the earth. The exploitation of the indigenous and colored populations outside Europe and the United States may cause outrage, but the outrage is more often than not accompanied by a sense that exploitation is natural to “those people.” Thus Maldonado-Torres uncovers two fundamental elements at work in the constitution of concrete lives under the colonial difference, which form the coloniality of being or existence: The understanding of race and gender through misanthropic skepticism and the understanding of race and gender through the naturalization of an ethics of war. The latter means that genders are also situated through misanthropic skepticism. The colored man is seen as a source of constant aggression, or as feminine or weak if he is understood as the enemy, whereas colored women are seen as available bodies for labor.52 Together these categorizations make up a different category of existence or the coloniality of being. If traditionally being is understood through the ontological question of the difference between Being and beings (the ontological difference), and if Levinas radicalizes this question by the anarchic move to consider Being from alterity (the trans-ontological difference), Maldonado-Torres adds a third ontological moment to philosophy’s understanding of the human. The existence of the damned configures a sub-ontological difference, or ontological colonial difference, which distinguishes between being and what lies below. The sub-ontological difference concerns the concrete existence of those lives subjugated and kept at the limit of death, as they are understood as bodies available for rape, murder, and unquestioned “natural” exploitation and degradation.53 As Maldonado-Torres writes: “The sub-ontological difference relates to what Walter Mignolo has referred to as the colonial difference. But while his notion of colonial difference is primarily epistemic, sub-ontological difference refers primarily to being.”54 In other words, as Maldonado-Torres goes on to explain, while Mignolo’s articulation “allows one to perceive the contours of the coloniality of knowledge,” the ontological colonial difference or sub-ontological difference allows us to expose the concrete, living presence of those undergoing the colonial difference. What remains, then, is to give articulation to “the existential modalities of the damnés.”55 When one considers the existential or living experience of the subjugated, one finds peoples, lives, and bodies that are simply made available for the unthinkable. “Black bodies are seen as excessively violent and erotic, as well as the legitimate recipients of excessive violence, erotic or otherwise. ‘Killability’ and ‘rapeability’ are part of their essence understood in a phenomenological way.”56 To be the other of the modern, colonial system is to be a subject not only in question but also naturally available for death.

Thinking in Remarkable Distinctness | 187 This existential and phenomenological realization leads to a double moment in which the colonial difference becomes a limit as well as a moment of transformation. Instead of asking the ontological question—Why is there something rather than nothing?—the colonized being at the limit of death, always exposed to death and to unthinkable violence and violation, must ask, “Why go on?” But, as Maldonado-Torres insightfully points out, this question itself arises from a prior expression of body and mind together. Why go on is preceded only by one expression, which becomes the first instance that reveals the coloniality of Being, that is the cry. The cry, not a word, but an interjection, is a call of attention to one’s own existence. The cry is the pretheoretical of the question . . . it is the cry that animates the birth of theory and critical thought. And the cry points to a peculiar existential condition: that of the condemned.57

We return to the realm of the pre-theoretical, and to the inseparability of body and mind, to a realm of aesthetic experience that underlies and precedes the rationalist articulation of existence. As I have already indicated, we will develop this aesthetic sense of decoloniality and of the colonial difference in the next chapter. The point here is that this cry reveals two fundamental insights for us. On the one hand, “the coloniality of Being is not an inevitable moment or natural outcome of the dynamics of creation of meaning.”58 On the other hand, the cry is the expression of a being, a consciousness that does not remain subjugated but that erupts, interrupts. It is the originary movement within the coloniality of difference of the insurrection of subjugated modes of knowledge, which is only possible now through the insurrection of subjugated bodies and expressions of life. The cry of the damnés expresses a loss that may be recovered through the insurrection of bodies and minds. As Maldonado-Torres explains, the damnés, the wretched of the earth, have lost the capacity to give (donner) by having been denied whatever life they had or could have. This leads to the formation of “a subject from whom the capacity to have and to give have been taken away. . . . The coloniality of being is thus . . . gift-giving and generous reception as a fundamental character of being-in-the-world.”59 This seemingly superficial moment of denial has profound implications for philosophical thought. As Maldonado-Torres concludes: “The ontological thus carries with it the marks of both positive achievement and betrayal of the trans-ontological relation, a relation of radical givenness and reception.”60 Alterity, or radical exteriority, is necessary and failed by the modern, colonial system and its conception of Being as the single determining question for philosophical thought. Maldonado-Torres goes on to point out, “Without giving to an Other there would be no self just as without receiving from the Other there would be no reason. In short, without a trans-ontological moment there would be no self, no reason, no being. The trans-ontological is the foundation of the ontological.”61 On the one hand, this means that philosophical

188 | Thinking from Radical Exteriority thought as oriented by the question of being and the ontological difference is founded on the existence of the damnés. Moreover, this foundation denies the claim of freedom and equality as the reason behind instrumental rationalism and the modern project of progress, since the trans-ontological is what is denied and excluded. One could say, here, that the rational lived experience puts into question instrumental subjective rationalism’s dearest claim and shows the emptiness behind it. On the other hand, this realization does not eliminate philosophy but offers a challenge for rethinking philosophical knowledge from other perspectives than the modern, colonial system. By looking closely at the existential modality of the colonial difference one finds the cry that in a moment of radical exteriority interrupts the rationalist discourse of modernity. In that cry, at the limit of the rational, appears the opening for engaging the senses of those lives caught in and transgressive in the colonial difference. This moment of exposure of the sub-ontological and of the perniciousness that underlies philosophical modern, colonial thought offers us another possibility: a thinking at the limit of modernity out of the concrete and meaningful lives and modes of knowledge of those once thought meaningless, nothing, and available for death. MaldonadoTorres returns to Dussel’s later idea of transmodernity and writes: “Transmodernity is an invitation to think modernity/coloniality critically from different epistemic positions and according to the manifold experiences of subjects who suffer different dimensions of the coloniality of Being.”62 This is not a formal observation, but uncovering the coloniality of being or existence will mean recognizing those subjugated bodies and modes of knowledge not only as cultural production but also as constitutive of thought. This will mean as well the transformation of institutions and practices of knowledge from below. As Maldonado-Torres concludes: “The decolonial turn marks the definitive entry of enslaved and colonized subjectivities into the realm of thought at before unknown institutional levels.”63 This transformation emerges out of the cry, the pretheoretical moment of sensibility, that creates space for the insurrection of subjugated lives, bodies, and modes of knowledge.

The Double Movement in the Coloniality of Gender, or the Insurrection of Life from within the Colonial Difference In her essay “Toward a Decolonial Feminism,” Argentine feminist decolonial philosopher María Lugones begins from the heart of the colonial difference and seeks to show the internal resistance to coloniality that occurs through people’s intimate and communal lives.64 As she explains, her aim is to engage the colonial difference in these registers: “In this paper I want to figure out how to think about intimate, everyday resistant interactions to the colonial differences. When I think of intimacy here, I am not thinking exclusively or mainly about sexual relations. I am thinking of the interwoven social life among people who are not acting as

Thinking in Remarkable Distinctness | 189 representatives or officials.65 Lugones situates her thought in the colonial difference and takes Maldonado-Torres’s recognition of the damnés and his call for a return to giving and receiving to the concrete and intimate level of people’s intersubjectivity, as lived through their self-understanding under the coloniality of gender. Lugones writes, “In our colonized, racially gendered, oppressed existences we are also other than what the hegemon makes us be.”66 In general the hegemonic structure of the coloniality of power and knowledge situates our lives, and moreover, Lugones argues that this occurs at the most intimate level of gender, through “the coloniality of gender.”67 In her analysis, she refines and exposes at a deeper, more immediate level the separation of the human and the non-human Maldonado-Torres recognizes. Other dichotomous hierarchies underlie the differentiation between human and non-human that defines the coloniality of being, among them the dichotomy between men and women.68 Men are the civilized, Eurocentric figures of the bourgeois, colonial, modern man, the “heterosexual, Christian, a being with mind and reason.”69 This figure becomes “man,” the agent, ruler, and determining logical locus for life. Along with man appears “woman,” who is not man’s complement but rather “someone who reproduced race and capital through her sexual purity, passivity, and being homebound in the service of the white, European, bourgeois man.”70 By contrast appears the other of this gender system: “This distinction became a mark of the human and a mark of civilization. Only the civilized are men or women. Indigenous peoples of the Americas and enslaved Africans were classified as not human species—as animals, uncontrollably sexual and wild.”71 Lugones goes on to point out that the man-woman determination of the civilized gives rise to a normative tool through which “the behaviors of the colonized and their personalities/souls were judged as bestial and thus non-gendered, promiscuous, grotesquely sexual, and sinful.”72 The differences become enmeshed in the intimate interaction and lives of those under the coloniality of power and knowledge. The result is the availability of the colonized bodies to death and the unspeakable violence Maldonado-Torres already underlines in his work. The colonial ‘civilizing mission’ was the euphemistic mask of brutal access to people’s bodies through unimaginable exploitation, violent sexual violation, control of reproduction, and systematic terror (feeding people alive to dogs or making pouches and hats from the vaginas of brutally killed indigenous females, for example).73

Rather than attempting to turn the indigenous into men and women (civilized human beings), the Christian civilizing mission served as an apparatus of subjection and extermination. “Turning the colonized into human beings was not a colonial goal.”74 This “civilizing” conversion reached deeply into people’s lives and consciousness:

190 | Thinking from Radical Exteriority The civilizing transformation justified the colonization of memory, and thus of people’s sense of self, of intersubjective relation, of their relation to the spirit world, to land, to the very fabric of their conception of reality, identity, and social, ecological, and cosmological organization. Thus, the Christian became the most powerful instrument in the mission of transformation, the normativity that connected gender and civilization became intent on erasing community, ecological practices, knowledge of planting, of weaving, of the cosmos, and not only on changing and controlling reproductive and sexual practices.75

Thus, the coloniality of gender is not merely a matter of the control of sexual reproduction and the normalization of sexuality, as Foucault sees it, for example. Nor do the wretched of the earth appear through a general, random violence that happens to make them the subjects of oppression and annihilation. Rather, it is by situating people’s genders into the specific grid or normative system of the colonizers that at every level lives and their meanings are dismissed or destroyed. As we will see in the next chapter, and as I already pointed out in chapter 3 when discussing the need for an aesthetics of liberation, the coloniality of being happens at pre-theoretical, pre-rational, and pre-linguistic levels. This observation takes us to the realm of sensibilities, affects, physicality, and the very embodied dispositions through which one finds the limits, margins, and creative and transformative possibilities of existence. In terms of decolonial feminism, one ends up with the colonized woman as an empty category: “no women are colonized; no females are women.”76 This is because according to the logic of the coloniality of gender, male and female colonized peoples are not men or women. Lugones takes this non-dialectic negativity not to present us with an issue of recognition through inclusion; we just saw the violent and fundamentally destructive character of inclusion into the normative system. Indeed, it is also not the case that she wishes to recognize a radical other that may be separated or recovered from the coloniality of gender (as does Dussel).77 Moreover, she also rejects Quijano’s idea that the colonized subject is wholly constructed by the coloniality of power and knowledge78 as well as the idea of a hybridity into which the coloniality of gender may dissolve in being reconfigured through new formations of identities beyond the violence and coloniality of gender.79 Lugones situates her thought within the concrete situation of the colonial difference, recognizing gender as a broken locus of enunciation and existence: “I suggest we focus on the beings that resist the coloniality of gender from ‘the colonial difference.’”80 The key to this point of departure is already given in the recognition of the colored female and male as non-gendered. Thus, there is something in the logic of coloniality that escapes it: the lives, the concrete practices, the incarnate subjectivities that in their very existence resist the coloniality of power and knowledge, of time, and of gender. “We are also other than the hegemon that makes us be.”81

Thinking in Remarkable Distinctness | 191 Lugones recognizes that within the colonial difference one finds a double movement of oppression and resistance.82 “Resistance is the tension between subjectification (the forming/informing of the subject) and active subjectivity, that minimal sense of agency required for the oppressing → ← resisting relation being an active one, without the appeal to the maximal sense of agency of the modern subject.”83 Note that this is the recognition of a tension and a movement that remains at play in the colonial difference. To acknowledge this tension as a resistance means to recognize the inequities and violence we have heard, which are elemental to the silencing and destruction that inform the broken locus of enunciation and lives. But this movement also bears with it forms of life and sensibilities that in part do not correspond to the hegemonic modern, colonial world system. Something slips. Lugones is not appealing to a new maximal sense of subjectivity to replace the one that is at the center of modern, rationalist, instrumental thought. As she writes: “If we are exhausted, fully made through and by micro and macro mechanisms and circulations of power, ‘liberation’ loses much of its meaning or ceases to be an intersubjective affair.”84 In other words, if normativity in its modern, colonial functioning entirely determines our existence, then there is nothing to do but repeat the patterns into which we have been inscribed. But whence, then, this possibility for another thought? Precisely from the experiences of resistance and oppression that characterize the dynamic of colonial difference. “Decolonizing gender is necessarily a praxis task. . . . As such it places the theorizing in the midst of people, in a historical, peopled, subjective/ intersubjective understanding of the oppressing → ← resisting relation at the intersection of complex systems of oppression.”85 This tension is already operative in the formation of the coloniality of power and knowledge Quijano describes. For Lugones, the Americas are clearly and emphatically already populated by a fecund life that is violently disturbed yet also continuous. The Global, capitalist, colonial, modern system of power that Aníbal Quijano characterizes as beginning in the sixteenth century in the Americas and enduring until today met not a world to be formed, a world of empty minds and evolving animals. Rather, it encountered complex cultural, political, economic, and religious beings: selves in complex relations to the cosmos, to other selves, to generation, to the earth, to living beings, to the inorganic, in production; selves whose erotic, aesthetic, and linguistic expressivity, whose forms of knowledge, senses of space, longings, practices, institutions, and forms of government were not to be simply replaced but met, understood, and entered into in tense, violent, risky crossings and dialogues, and negotiations that never happened.86

I take Lugones to be speaking of the subjugated forms of knowledge that may become points of insurrection, to go back to Foucault’s phrase quoted by CastroGómez. Moreover, the fact that the dialogue and encounter never happened

192 | Thinking from Radical Exteriority points to that moment in the configuration of modernity when the rational gives way to analytical and productive rationalism sustained by the coloniality of power and knowledge and the coloniality of time with its racial, epistemic prejudices. But the point is that colonization invented the colonized, as Orientalism has shown so well, and this invention occurred and continues to occur within a broken locus sustained by a fundamental tension between the invented colonized (or the other of the colonizer) and the living existence that remains the differend, the ungraspable, the slipping of the modern colonial project. María Lugones concretely points out the presence and dynamic of such living forms of knowledge that harbor the very possibility of decoloniality. As she puts it: “instead of thinking of the global, capitalist, colonial system as in every way successful in its destruction of peoples, forms of knowledge, relations, and economies, I want to think of the process as continually resisted, and being resisted today.”87 As she explains: “The fractured locus includes the hierarchical dichotomy that constitutes the subjectification of the colonized. But the locus is fractured by the resistant presence, the active subjectivity of the colonized against the colonial invasion of self in community from the inhabitation of that self.”88 One might say, to put it in another light, that for example, Lugones is calling for the kind of work that Eduardo Galeano has engaged in, which recognizes Latin America’s living experience in the lives, forms of consciousness, practices, history, aesthetics, conceptions of meanings, and delimitations of worlds that have configured Latin America. Of course, this is not a matter of returning to the indigenous past, of recovering a golden age. As Lugones points out: “ I am investigating and emphasizing the historicity of the oppressing → ← resisting relation and thus emphasizing concrete, lived resistances to the coloniality of gender.”89 Lugones follows a specific methodology that situates thinking in concrete living experiences: “In thinking of the methodology of decoloniality, I move to read the social from the cosmologies that inform it, rather than beginning with a gender reading of cosmologies informing and constituting perception, motility, embodiment, and relation.”90 This thinking begins from how people’s lives take their orientation from their specific historicity, in contrast to taking for granted gender difference and dismissing life in the name of the constructed situation, function, and sense of life and subjectivity belonging to colonial modernity. The point, in other words, is not to read gender into an already operative social sense but “to understand the organization of the social in terms that unveil the deep disruption of the gender imposition.”91 This is why, later in her essay, Lugones emphasizes: “The reading moves against social-scientific objectifying readings, attempting rather to understand subjects.”92 Lugones’s own example concerning inhabiting and thinking in the fractured locus of enunciation will help to clarify the way she is engaging the colonial difference and its inherent insurrectional movement of subjugated knowledge.

Thinking in Remarkable Distinctness | 193 She discusses the case of Filomena Miranda and explains Miranda’s distinct sense of “living well” (suma qamaña) by being chachawarmi. The story bears layers of complex relational systems of understanding, but the point I want to underline here is that ultimately the story shows that if forced to adopt the gender separations and language of Western thought, Filomena Miranda could never live a fulfilled life in terms of her distinct existence.93 Lugones begins with Miranda’s explanation about the meaning of the words qamaña and utjaña, which are usually translated as “living.”94 Miranda’s explication makes clear that utjaña refers to the uta, that is, to dwelling in the community and the communal land. For her, living in the sense of qamaña is impossible without dwelling within the community on the communal lands (utjaña). Miranda keeps her utjaña, and therefore, although she lives in La Paz, she returns to her community to participate in the governing of her people. In other words, Miranda’s existence is always one in between. This living in between bears a further dimension. In order for Miranda to participate in dwelling with her community, she rules together with her sister, thereby taking the place of father and mother, chacha and warmi, respectively. The crucial point is that in ruling in this manner Miranda has her utjaña by being chachawarmi. But this term cannot be translated simply as “man and woman,” in the way father and mother would be traditionally distinguished in modern, colonial terms. Moreover, to translate it in this way would disrupt the very way Miranda—and also the Bolivian government of Evo Morales, together with the indigenous movement of Abya Yala—understand “living well” (suma qamaña). Not only is living (qamaña) impossible without utjaña but in this case utjaña is only understandable without separating man and woman in the modern Western manner in terms of their roles and significance within the community and for the community. The undoing or “translation” of chachawarmi would disrupt not only the community but also the ultimate function of the community, which is to sustain cosmic balance. Lugones’s example shows how Miranda’s life is a site of the colonial difference and, moreover, a site of constant resistance by virtue of how existence is interpreted through specific living and linguistic practices. As Lugones puts it, “her resistance to the coloniality of gender is also lived linguistically in the tension of the colonial wound.”95 Lugones’s example does not justify a theory but shows the performed articulation of the colonial difference in its rupturing and transformative movement. The insurrection of subjugated forms of knowledge is already happening, outside of the academy and its theorizing. It happens in how those inhabiting the colonial difference undergo the oppressing → ← resisting relation. As Lugones argues and shows, decoloniality happens as one engages one’s specific situation. However, as Lugones herself indicates, a distinction must be drawn between subjective individual self-assertion and the kind of decolonial moment she is talking about. Her thought moves away from social-scientific objectifying

194 | Thinking from Radical Exteriority readings of the coloniality of gender, because the point of the fracture does not belong to a subjective consciousness as imagined by the modern, colonial system of subjective rationalism. This is why Lugones begins from the cosmological: “the fractured locus is in common, the histories of resistance at the colonial difference are where we need to dwell, learning about each other.”96 As she also states later on: “Communities rather than individuals enable the doing; one does [something] with someone else, not in individual isolation.”97 I take this last observation not to be prescriptive but the result of observation and experience. When one begins to listen to the communities and their subjects in their interrelations, one does not find an agenda of liberation, a method: The logic they follow is not countenanced by the logic of power. The movement of these bodies and relations does not repeat itself. It does not become static and ossified. Everything and everyone continues to respond to power and responds much of the time resistingly—which is not to say in open defiance, though some of the time there is open defiance—in ways that may or may not be beneficial to capital, but that are not part of its logic.98

One may think back to the issue of ana-chronic temporalities, of overlapping of forms of lives, and of narratives, which in their crossings are always in play in the colonial difference and yet displace, disseminate, and undo the central logic of power. As Lugones concludes, we find this movement of liberation, the decolonial turn, when we engage our lives in their most intimate and proximate events: “The passing from mouth to mouth, from hand to hand of lived practices, values, beliefs, ontologies, space-times, and cosmologies.”99 Lugones writes: The production of the everyday within which one exists produces one’s self as it provides particular, meaningful clothing, food, economies, and ecologies, gestures, rhythms, habitats, and senses of space and time. But it is important that these ways are not just different. They include affirmation of life over profit, communality over individualism, ‘estar’ over enterprise, being in relation rather than dichotomously split over in hierarchically and violently ordered fragments.100

At the end of her engagement with the colonial difference Lugones finds a path for a decolonial thought that arises from the ana-chronic simultaneity of narratives and forms of lives in concrete terms. This concrete way of beginning to think in a decolonial manner involves listening attentively to life, rather than thinking in terms of general rationalist theories, binary systems of recognition, and instrumental, calculative thinking sustained by the self-certainty of modern, colonial rational subjectivism and its “objective,” untouched, and infinitely critical point of view. The shift may perhaps be captured by emphasizing the Spanish word in Lugones’s text: the point is to learn to dwell in “estar” rather than beginning from “Ser,” “Being.”

Thinking in Remarkable Distinctness | 195 In the case of both Maldonado-Torres and Lugones, living bodies become the site for the resistance and undoing of the coloniality of power and knowledge. Their liberating movements of distinct lives are interpreted in terms of transformations at the epistemic, existential, social, and political levels. In the next chapter I take up an issue that is always on the surface and at the deepest levels of these liberatory and transformative movements and which we have already seen surface at crucial moments in our discussion: the aesthetic dimension of decoloniality.

10

Fecund Undercurrents On the Aesthetic Dimension of Latin American and Decolonial Thought

Throughout this book I have underlined an issue that accompanies the various discourses of liberation and decolonial thought in Latin America, namely, the issue of its aesthetic dimension. As we saw, Dussel’s philosophy of liberation is based on a pre-rational and pre-linguistic sensibility, a sense of radical exteriority, that distinguishes humans. Quijano exposes a pre-rational disposition or sensibility that sustains the coloniality of power and knowledge. Moreover, as he goes on to uncover and engage ana-chronic simultaneity in Latin American existence, Quijano turns to the writers, poets, and artists of Latin America, who articulate senses of existence beyond and otherwise than the coloniality of power, knowledge, and time. For Santiago Castro-Gómez, Latin American reason is situated in a hybrid space of creation in which not only the social sciences but art and life infiltrate, contaminate, and transform how one thinks the very dynamics of being in Latin America. For Walter Mignolo, to think in the colonial difference is to engage life in all of its registers. Moreover, in an article concerning two art installations, he writes: “What I saw in these installations; the first in 1992 and the last two in 2008, are ways in which aesthetics, most of all in art, but not only in art, contribute to decolonial processes.”1 Following Mignolo into the space of colonial difference, we found at the heart of the liberatory moment in Maldonado-Torres’s essay not a theory of liberation but the articulate cry from which all decolonial theory may arise. For her part, María Lugones concludes her thoughts on decolonial feminism by bringing us back to the mouth-to-mouth and handto-hand transmission of traditions, and to affective ways of encountering the world and sensibilities that resist the modern, colonialist, rational system of power from within the colonial difference. In short, at each step of our discussion we have found aesthetics as an active element. My contribution to the decolonial Latin America project is this introduction of a decolonial aesthetics central to liberation and decolonial philosophies.

196

Fecund Undercurrents | 197 In preparation for the following discussion I underlined two crucial moments. The first, in my analysis of Dussel’s thought, was the need for an aesthetics of liberation. As I showed, Dussel’s thought is based on an appeal to life, which in turn depends on a pre-rational sensibility or sense of radical exteriority. Given that colonization and the dependency that follows from it happen at what Fanon called the “epidermic,” or existential, level, as long as the pre-linguistic and pre-theoretical domination of bodies, affects, and sensibilities is not undone, the philosophy of liberation will remain short of its liberatory goals. The second key moment is found in my discussion of ana-chronic, simultaneous temporality in Quijano’s work. As I showed, Quijano’s analysis exposes a level of experience of existence that marks an aesthetic—rather than analytical or discursive—sense of Latin American existence. In entering into the issue of temporalities, we enter into configurations of consciousness that occur out of affect, habit, movement, bodily and involuntary memory, sensibilities, fears, anxieties, violence, and trauma. In short, we raise issues of embodied projections that may delimit life and its possibilities. Our thought shifts away from issues of representation as we are thrown into questioning the elements that situate our dispositions and projections toward the senses of things, the limits of knowledge, and how phenomena may become knowledge or be discarded as meaningless. It is this series of dimensions of experience that I call the aesthetic sense of coloniality and decoloniality. This level of experiences must be engaged in ways analogous to what María Lugones and Maldonado-Torres suggest. Indeed, I believe that the coloniality of being is ultimately constructed and may be undone through engaging this aesthetic level of the human. In the following discussion I will take up two figures in which I find a clear engagement with the colonial difference in its inner tension and a movement of de-linking that no longer remains wedded to theory or the rational in the modern, colonial sense. I will set up the problem by discussing Fanon’s difficulty in his attempt to give articulation to his distinct existence outside the coloniality of power, knowledge, and time. Discussing this difficulty will introduce the issue of self-articulation through images in light of what I will call the coloniality of images, that is, the way images are limited and determined by the logic of the coloniality of power and knowledge and its racial and epistemic timeline. Then I will discuss the work of Nelly Richard and the installations of Alfredo Jaar as two instances of de-linking that displace and overcome the coloniality of time and of the image at an aesthetic level. But here I must preface the discussion with a brief clarification, required in part by virtue of my suspicion concerning the way aesthetic experience is understood by many today, even within the philosophy of liberation and decolonial movements.

Decolonial Aesthetics? There are many ways of understanding aesthetics. Furthermore, in Latin America there is a tradition of writings about art and sensibility that accompanies the

198 | Thinking from Radical Exteriority development of philosophy. I will cite two very important examples. The first is the ongoing discussion concerning José Rodó’s little—but incisive—book Ariel, in which he speaks of a Latin American sensibility that is different from the North American, and the history of responses, including Roberto FernándesRetamar’s major contribution Calibán.2 The other example is the aesthetic movement that follows José Vasconcelos’s Estética (1936) and his commissioning the Mexican muralists.3 Furthermore, the history of art and aesthetic movements in Latin America is as rich as and often more complex than Western European and North American art by virtue of the very issue of dependency and coloniality. To make things more complicated, I believe that “art” in Latin America must be rethought in terms of its oral traditions and popular expression, including festivals, traditional dance and music, food, indigenous rituals, etc. These are all fragments of Latin American aesthetics, and they require separate study, particularly in relation to issues of decoloniality. Moreover, the very treatment of these fields of study requires the following clarification, which concerns this present section and is behind the central aim of this chapter. “Aesthetics” in the many senses used above is based on a modern, colonial interpretation of the experiences I have mentioned at the end of the introduction (affect, habit, movement, bodily and involuntary memory, sensibilities, fears, anxieties, violence, etc.). Following the inheritance of the coloniality of power, knowledge, and time as well as the epistemic prejudice and racism of modernity and the separation of body from mind, Baumgarten inaugurates aesthetics (after Kant) as the science or study of taste and the beautiful. In order to understand the implications of this sense of aesthetics, one may draw a brief contrast with ancient Greek thought. Baumgarten’s definition of aesthetics differs greatly from the ancient Greek sense of aesthetics or aesthesis. Aesthesis for the Greeks has to do with bodily experience and with affect and sensibility. For them these were not irrational parts of being human and not separate from knowing; rather, they were constitutive of the sense of being human and fundamental to human knowledge. In the Poetics Aristotle is clear about the fact that, just as humans are the living beings that have logos (as he states in the Nicomachean Ethics) and that are political by nature (as he states in the Politics), they are also mimetic by nature. “Mimetic” here means able to mimic, to copy. Furthermore, this ability is inseparable from the very life of the mind or soul and of the city, since citizens, slaves, women, children, and strangers find their place in the world not only through arguments and politics but also in the sense of being they encounter in the Greek theater. To copy is to re-present in the form of a confrontation with our limit. And this limit is met in the Greek theater through the experience of katharsis.4 This is not the experience of pure, rational order but the undergoing and going under of one’s identity through a confrontation with chance, the uncontrollable, the unexpected, the uncanny, that which is strange beyond measure. In contrast

Fecund Undercurrents | 199 to the modern, colonial pretention of domination, one finds in katharsis a communal engagement with the concrete radical exteriority that is inseparable from logos, language, number, calculation, and the theoretical. One of the results of the construction of the ego cogito is the loss of this radical sensibility, which after the separation of the rational from the irrational becomes an issue of mind over matter and of calculative rationality over the uncivilized, irrational, etc. But I must emphasize that this is not a division that merely affects Western rationality; rather, it is the result of the coloniality of power and knowledge. Thus, what remains in play to date is the supposedly necessary primacy of reason over the irrational body, sensibilities, affects, intuitions, and memories. In light of this, I am proposing a decolonial aesthetics that goes well beyond theorizing sensibilities and beyond a rational critique of works of art or analyzing the physiological basis for judgments of beauty or taste. Also, at the aesthetic level I am indicating that it is not enough to change images, find new representations, or even make explicit what was before unseen or concealed.5 These are certainly necessary elements of a decolonial aesthetics, but in the end, one must turn to the pre-theoretical, the pre-linguistic, and the pre-rational if the rational is not to be merely understood in terms of the modern, colonial characterization of rationality and the human. I said that these comments come in part in light of a suspicion on my part. I can best illustrate my suspicion by way of a story a philosopher told me about how he changed from being a devout and gifted Christian to becoming a radical American postmodern thinker. As he explained to me, he realized one day that some time ago he had stopped believing in God—but this was not the insight. The issue was that at that moment he also realized that he had continued to act, speak, and feel as if he did. In terms of our discussion of liberation philosophy and decoloniality, I have indicated that this is what happens in different ways in Dussel’s thought as well as in Quijano’s. (And I would not claim that the present analysis is beyond such an involuntary enactment of lineages that go on in spite of our best insights and intentions.) I believe that Mignolo, Maldonado-Torres, and Lugones see this problem and, each in a distinct manner, engage that level of experience and consciousness that goes on working and determining our lives long after liberation or decoloniality have been recognized as the matter of critique and theorizing. I also believe that the word “epistemic” often serves to bridge the discomfort of needing to go beyond the rational and yet remaining with the modern, colonial distinction between the rational and its other. All of this is to say that I have found few thinkers able to risk rationalist analysis, argumentation, theorizing, and—on the other side of the coin—faith and religiosity in order to engage the aesthetic dimension in its aesthetic coloniality and to take a muchneeded decolonial aesthetic turn. Thus, my suspicion is that at a certain level we are still holding on to the primacy of reason over aesthetic experience as we de-

200 | Thinking from Radical Exteriority velop our liberatory and decolonial narratives. We are speaking of limits that (one must acknowledge) few are in a position to question and that cannot take precedence over social, economic, political, and ultimately life-and-death situations. However, as I have shown in the previous chapters, the aesthetic dimension of coloniality is a crucial issue because it is not separate from the other aspects of the senses of life and humanity that decolonial thought seeks to undo and reconfigure from below. This chapter introduces two ways of engaging aesthetics in which I find openings for such a radical aesthetic decoloniality (in the work of Nelly Richard and Alfredo Jaar). But first, let us look closely at the difficulty of articulating distinct existence from radical exteriority through Fanon’s Black Skin White Masks.

Fanon’s Paradox: Existence without Images, or the Coloniality of Images: Toward Engaging the Coloniality of Images This section focuses on dynamic mental images that are co-constitutive of the very determinations of reality and possibility under which our senses of life open up and unfold. Such images appear in their originary sense as imago, as the play of imagination in the unfolding of existence. Dynamic images express senses of life, and they are configured by a complex concentration of concrete experiences, histories, lineages, memories, forgetting, loss, anxieties, and incapacities. This last sense of images refers us to philosophical knowledge in that images in their dynamic sense delineate the boundaries of any possible articulation of senses of being in their dynamic, transforming unfolding. What is at stake is not merely one element among others in a mechanism or movement that underlies philosophical knowledge. Dynamic images concern the possibilities and limits for the articulation of lives that may be understood in their humanity; that is, images affirm and give occasion for the articulation of one’s distinct senses of being. This occurs through the experience of an imagination that creates leeway for new determinations of identities and senses of being beyond already-established systems of conceptual knowledge (for example, when we change our minds, see a problem differently, or have an idea, or when a child is born into a family or community, thus transforming the latter.). The dynamic quality of images makes it difficult to recognize their role in the configuration of human knowledge and their power over our interpretations and determinations of the many senses of beings. This relationship between images and philosophical knowledge is further complicated when one looks at it from the perspective of a colonized consciousness, be it in Latin America, Africa, or any other situation in which images are determined by conceptual and cultural expectations from outside a specific living context. As Peruvian philosopher Aníbal Quijano explains about the Latin American case,

Fecund Undercurrents | 201 The Eurocentric perspective of knowledge operates as a mirror that distorts what is reflected, as we can see in the Latin American historical experience. That is to say, what we Latin Americans find in that mirror is not completely chimerical, since we possess so many and such important historically European traits in many material and intersubjective aspects. But at the same time we are profoundly different. Consequently, when we look in our Eurocentric mirror, the image that we see is not composite but also necessarily partial and distorted. The tragedy is that we have all been led, knowingly or not, wanting it or not, to see and accept that image as our own and as belonging to us alone. In this way, we continue being what we are not.6

In such cases as that of Latin America, self-knowledge and the very possibility of philosophical knowledge are dependent on images that are not our own. To return to Salazar Bondy’s point, this culture of misleading self-images makes an articulate Latin American existence that deals with its reality impossible. But the central issue here is not a natural underdevelopment; rather, it is by virtue of the kinds of images that situate Latin American consciousness and colonized consciousness in general that the underdevelopment occurs. Thus, images hold sway over knowledge by limiting existence. Here the force of imagination over the very possibility of knowledge becomes exposed in its particularly pernicious ways. It is this difficult issue of how such images occur in spite of one’s distinct sense of existence that I discuss first in the following pages, ultimately with the aim of showing how this distorted displacement of existence may be challenged and overcome. As Quijano indicates above, the problem is that the colonized see themselves through a Eurocentric image. I take Eurocentrism to be a specific characteristic of modern Westernizing European and then North American philosophy (as an extension and development of principles first held by European philosophy), which extends to the colonized consciousness of its other throughout the world. In all cases the problem is a certain egocentrism that situates these modern traditions around the idea of a rational subjectivity (the ego cogito) that figures the center of all knowledge and the most advanced form of understanding available to humanity in general. As we learned from our discussion of Quijano in chapter 5, this place of the ego cogito is secured and sustained by a specific order of power, knowledge, time, and thought. I must emphasize that the fundamental problem for my discussion is not a transformation in European or North American selfunderstanding or understanding of the colonized, although this is undoubtedly necessary. The issue is the articulation and critical dismantling of the Eurocentric images that the colonized take to be their own. Therefore, my discussion primarily situates itself and arises out of the perspective of the colonized, toward the liberation of the colonized from the coloniality of images.7 However, given that Europe, North America, and the colonized are at many levels inseparable, my discussion relies on the critical assessment of the European and North American modernity we have already exposed in previous chapters, particularly of

202 | Thinking from Radical Exteriority those aspects of modernity that prove most pernicious to other peoples and cultures by sustaining the Eurocentric and Westernizing structures of power, which consolidate the images that distort the senses of existence of the colonized. Lastly, I believe that this discussion is crucial to any claim of philosophical knowledge with the intention of arguing for humanity and freedom, claims that are the foundation of modern Western philosophy. In this sense, exposing the issue of the coloniality of images is not an appendix to the philosophical exploration of the senses of images and imagination for philosophical knowledge but is central to philosophy in many of its delimitations today and in its possible developments to come. In the fifth chapter of Black Skin White Masks, titled “The Lived Experience of the Black” (L’expérience vécue du Noir), Fanon gives a detailed analysis of the experience of alienation undergone by him as a colonized colored person.8 As the title of the chapter indicates, the discussion moves through various images of the Negro in an attempt to give articulation to the identity of a living experience that has been alienated by Eurocentric images. The limitation of images and the distortion of existence become painfully evident once Fanon moves beyond stereotypes about the Negro and attempts to affirm his distinct existence.9 Fanon’s first attempt to find recognition is by turning to the rational principles of the dignity found in a common humanity. As he concludes, “In the abstract there was agreement: The negro is a human being. . . . But on certain points white man remained intractable. Under no condition did he want any intimacy between the races.”10 Even if at a rational level a sense of equality could be tolerated, ultimately the human equality of the Negro’s existence remained questionable. Even in rational agreement a racial “natural” hierarchy would prevail. “I had rationalized the world and the world had rejected me on the basis of color prejudice.”11 Given the impossibility of finding equality by seeing himself as a rational being among other rational beings, Fanon turns to its opposite. “From the opposite end of the white world a magical Negro culture was hailing me. . . . Since no agreement was possible on the level of reason, I threw myself back toward unreason.”12 Here the Negro figures an intuitive sensual being identified by his or her non-rational intuition. “Little by little . . . I secreted a race. And that race staggered under the burden of a basic element. What was it? Rhythm?”13 The image of a rational being is replaced with that of a rhythmic life that in its movement has a direct connection with existence and the inverse of rationality. “Eyah! The tomtom chatters out the cosmic message. Only the Negro has the capacity to convey it, to decipher its meaning, its import.”14 In Fanon’s analysis, this image seems to make the articulation of the singular existence of the Negro possible for the first time. “So here we have the Negro rehabilitated, ‘standing before the bar,’ ruling the world with his intuition . . . he is not a Negro but the Negro, exciting the fecund antennae of the world, placed in

Fecund Undercurrents | 203 the foreground of the world. . . . I am the world.”15 Fanon’s statements are sustained by quotes from the poetry of Léopold Senghor and Aimé Césaire, by images of roots that go back to ancient Africa and ultimately to the heart of cosmic existence and knowledge. This is, however, not a moment of overcoming Eurocentric images but rather one of self-recognition through the image of the Negro as the dialectical opposite of European rationality.16 At this point of his reflection, Fanon’s newly discovered self-image places him from the start within the order of the colonial world. His image is that of the negativity of reason, of the dialectical opposite of the white world: “Up to the neck in the irrational.”17 As the opposite of rationality, the poetic and mythical image of the Negro is subject to three criticisms. First Fanon points to the rational objection to his abandonment of reason: “Black magic, primitive mentality, animism, animal eroticism, it all floods over me. All of it is typical of people who have not kept with the evolution of the human race. Or, if one prefers, this is humanity at its lowest.”18 Now Fanon’s image comes under the scrutiny of Western modern progress. The images he finds have already been colonized by the Eurocentric idea that those who do not know the world in a Western rational manner cannot be civilized, fully human; this puts into question Fanon’s affirmation of his blackness through images of the irrational. In response to this, Fanon has no choice but to insist on his resistance against rationality. Thus, he repeats Senghor’s famous statement: “Emotion is completely black as reason is Greek.”19 But in spite of his best argument for the distinctness of the black person in terms of his or her particular mystic knowledge, Fanon’s position is still appropriated by the conceptual expectations of the white, colonizing modern world. I made myself the poet of the world. The white man had found a poetry in which there was nothing poetic. . . . I had soon to change my tune. . . . The white man explained to me that . . . I represent a stage of development: ‘Your properties have been exhausted by us. We have had earth mystics such as you will never approach.’ 20

Again, the challenge comes from a Eurocentric colonialist position. This time the argument refers to the timeline of development that would recognize other people’s cultures as examples of a distant past consciousness already overcome by a modern, contemporary world. In this sense Fanon’s image would simply fit into a moment already overcome in the development of the West and would represent a lesser stage earlier in the development of human life. Fanon responds in light of anthropological and historical evidence and shows that what is considered white Western culture was already predated by vast developments precisely in the black world. Ségou, Djenné, cities of more than a hundred thousand people; accounts of learned blacks (doctors of theology who went to Mecca to study the Koran). All of that ex-

204 | Thinking from Radical Exteriority humed from the past. . . . The white man was wrong, I was not primitive, not even a half-man, I belonged to a race that had been working in gold and silver two thousand years ago.21

With this argument Fanon finds “a place in history.” The image of the instinctual life is supplemented and strengthened with the one of that life’s own history, such that blackness becomes a rational and yet intuitive existence. However, the specific modern Western ideal of industrialization and scientism as the highest accomplishment of humanity returns to claim Fanon’s identity. This time—in response to Fanon’s rational argument about the historical past of his identity—appears the claim that Western white consciousness is superior by virtue of its maturity, a maturity that is apparent in the highest development of the industrialized and scientific world. Lay aside your history, your investigation of the past, and try to feel yourself into our rhythm. In a society such as ours, industrialized to the highest degree, dominated by scientism, there is no longer room for your sensitivity. . . . Oh, certainly, I will be told, now and then when we are worn out by our lives in big buildings, we will turn to you as we do to our children—to the innocent, the ingenuous, the spontaneous. We will turn to you as to the childhood of the world. . . . In a way you reconcile us with ourselves.22

Given industrial development, Fanon’s claim to an historical past may only represent an acceptable and even golden age that must now be put aside in the name of the real world. As Fanon puts it, here his reason encounters “real reason” (notice his quotation marks).23 The image of a historically distinct being becomes secondary to the present, and the present belongs to the most developed culture, to the industrialized, white, modern, Western world. The image of the native intuition of the world and the image of its historical consciousness are both appropriated under the same Eurocentric timeline. Human history has one course, and it leads to the highest development of human knowledge occurring with modern Western culture. Moreover, this development also holds the future of all human existence in its present. This moment of appropriation of the present in the name of a future that belongs to the development of modern Western consciousness will be the last step in the collapse of Fanon’s attempt to find an articulate image for the distinct existence of the Negro. The idea of looking to the naive black as an occasional reconciliation of white culture with its naive or childlike self, with its innocence, precludes a deeper appropriation of the series of experiences, one that Fanon articulates in his work and that leads to his difficult encounter with Sartre. Fanon’s controversy with Sartre arises from what the French philosopher writes in his “Orphée Noir,” the introduction to a francophone poetry anthology written by blacks from the French colonies (Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache).24 The anthology presented poetry that gave articulation to the identities of blacks from the colonies in their own terms and included some of the major figures of the negri-

Fecund Undercurrents | 205 tude movement in France and Africa. As Fanon explains, Sartre’s interpretation takes this movement as a moment of negativity against white racism. In Sartre’s words, the articulation of black identities becomes a single moment of “anti-racist racism.”25 Thus, the poetry that would represent the articulate existence of the black human being turns out to be but a moment in a Western dialectical movement. Ultimately this means that Sartre resituates the poetry of negritude back in the larger Western project of the development of a universal consciousness. Sartre’s conclusion: In fact negritude appears as a minor term of a dialectical progression: The theoretical and practical assertion of the supremacy of the white man is its thesis; the position of negritude as an antithetical value is the moment of negativity. But this negative moment is insufficient by itself, and the Negros who employ it know this very well; they know that it is intended to prepare the synthesis or realization of the human in a society without races. Thus negritude is its own destruction, it is a transition and not a conclusion, a means and not an ultimate end.26

For Sartre the dialectical movement has a European resolution in that the liberation of black consciousness becomes subsumed under the Marxist labor movement of the industrialized Western nations. For Fanon this is a great blow to the whole generation of black poets and thinkers. This is not because Sartre has exposed their transient character but because he has once again appropriated the very images aimed to give a distinct presence to black existence and identity. For Fanon this appropriation results not from an insight but from a mistake in Sartre’s thinking. In a universalizing gesture, Sartre overlooks the distinctness of those lives, those existences, which Fanon seeks to bring to light. Indeed, subsuming negritude under the dialectical movement of history ends up taking away not only the present but also the future: “Without a Negro past, without a Negro future, it was impossible for me to live my Negrohood. Not yet white, no longer black, I was damned.”27 Fanon’s existence has been placed in a space of non-identity, in limbo. Once again Fanon’s existence occurs too late, in a white man’s world. Limited to Eurocentric images, Fanon cannot find an image that will give a place of articulation to his existence. There are no images beyond those that will allow appropriation and reduction of the existence of the colored person, and therefore there is no place for those existences. Thus, Fanon closes by finding himself nowhere: “Without responsibility, straddling Nothingness and infinity, I began to weep.”28 Fanon’s difficulty may be understood by interpreting it in light of Quijano’s analysis of the coloniality of power and knowledge and its racialized temporality. Fanon’s attempt and failure to find an image that will allow for the articulation of his distinctive existence results from the fact that whatever image he summons is already by definition situated by the ordering of the coloniality of power and knowledge. When Fanon turns to the affirmation of his blackness, he finds at

206 | Thinking from Radical Exteriority each turn objections that arise from a progressive temporality that follows from the coloniality of time. That is, not only is he answering to the “natural” racial hierarchy created under the coloniality of power but every image he summons has been placed under the specific temporality that underlies the colonial structures of power and knowledge. As we saw in chapter 5, according to this idea of temporality, there is one single historical development—going from the naïve state of nature of the savage to the highest development of humanity—that is the accomplishment of modern Western rationalism. As Fanon makes his first turn toward the articulation of his experience in a positive sense, he finds himself forced to choose between the rational and the irrational, thus repeating the racist epistemic duality sustained by the coloniality of power and knowledge, under the coloniality of time. In affirming his blackness Fanon has no choice but to take the position opposite of rationality; he must choose either rationality or being primitive, magical, irrational.29 The two objections to his claim to an identity through irrationality directly point back to the temporality that underlies coloniality. In the first case, Fanon’s a-rationality is suspected of being savage, uncivilized: a step back from civilization. The second objection reminds Fanon of modern progress and answers to his acknowledgment of history by dismissing it in the name of the modern, rational, scientific world, the highest form of humanity. Finally, Fanon encounters this colonizing temporality in its strongest form in Sartre’s dialectic, in which the future belongs to that single Western historical development, and thus, even if the present makes negritude evident, it is but a moment in the development of Western rational knowledge. Ultimately, Fanon’s humanity will not be presentable beyond the constraints of images possible under and within the Eurocentric and racial temporal line of progress. In short, the images Fanon discusses in chapter 5 of Black Skin White Masks are always Eurocentric by virtue of the order of power and knowledge and single historical timeline that situates them. A last aspect of the coloniality of power and knowledge helps to complete the analysis of how Eurocentric images function. This is one element in what I called the coloniality of thought (as we saw in chapter 5, this is the set of expectations that underlie what is taken to be conceptual or philosophical knowledge in modern Western philosophy). In terms of the history of modern philosophy, one of the primary characteristics that distinguishes the ego cogito from all other ways of knowing is that, by virtue of being transcendental, its knowledge is objective. The ground of Western modern thought is transcendental knowledge, that is, an understanding that moves beyond empirical knowledge.30 The question for us is how this transcendental move operates in relation to the coloniality of power and knowledge. As we saw in chapter 5, in his work The Hubris of Point Zero, Colombian philosopher Santiago Castro-Gómez shows that with the construction of the coloni-

Fecund Undercurrents | 207 ality of knowledge and its hierarchy in the Americas, there appears also a sense of thinking that orders reality while remaining outside of that which it orders.31 Once the hierarchy of epistemic possibilities has been established, the rational principles that have ordered knowledge withdraw and become the transcendental site of the hierarchy. Castro-Gomez shows how this occurs in the settling of Nueva Granada, where the colony is ruled by criollos (sons of Spaniards with indigenous mothers) who identify themselves with European principles. But these principles that order the colonial and arising modern city become a point of origin beyond all empirical reality and, therefore, ultimately unquestionable. In other words, having gained its position through the coloniality of power and knowledge, the ego cogito, the site of modern Western reason, becomes an invisible, untouchable, and yet all-pervading system of knowledge. This transcendental move conceals the system of power and knowledge and puts it beyond any factual critique or transformation from without. In fact, viewed from the point of a rational, Western, transcendental position, Fanon’s argument seems to only affect the empirical realm and not the higher form of thinking associated with transcendental knowledge. However, as Castro-Gomez shows in his detailed study, the transcendental claim is part of the coloniality of power and knowledge that grounds the ego cogito at the center of all knowledge. Ultimately, as one learns from Quijano, the ego cogito’s claim to transcendental knowledge hangs on the system constructed through the hierarchical placement of lives during the invasion and exploitation of the Americas. Therefore, focus on the transcendental character of experience and its principles will not serve to escape the pervading and invisible power of coloniality but only to conceal it. In light of the transcendental turn in coloniality, one may see Fanon’s problem as the result of an inclusive exclusion (to use Giorgio Agamben’s language) whereby Fanon’s images are always already included by a system of power that—through action at an infinite distance—situates them, delimits them, and at the same time remains untouched by them and by Fanon’s experience.32 At each point in Fanon’s discussion, the images he finds are framed by a system of power that limits their meaning. Therefore, the images may make visible only the possibilities of existence under the order of power and knowledge. Furthermore, because the images are read only in terms of that colonizing timeline, they are defined by the single project of the coloniality of Western, objective, rational consciousness. Indeed, this is the background of Sartre’s mistake when he cannot summon an image that will allow him to see negritude for itself. To say it in another way, perhaps more urgent for the reader: The only images that appear are those that respond to the hierarchical and temporal frame of coloniality, and in this sense one’s vision, one’s very possibility of knowledge through images, has been colonized. Without undermining or putting aside Fanon’s crucial point about the difference in the lived experience of colonizers and the colonized, one

208 | Thinking from Radical Exteriority must wonder about the extent to which Fanon’s paradoxical existence without images spills over into Western existence. This raises a question about the extent to which philosophers in Westernized or colonized contexts and systems of knowledge may think freely and speak of philosophical knowledge when all images have been placed under the economy of the coloniality of power, knowledge, and thought.33

Displacing the Coloniality of Images Embodying Radical Exteriority’s Ana-chronic Temporalities: Nelly Richard on Death of the Maiden and Alfredo Castro’s Theater of Memory It has been said that to be a philosopher of a place it is not enough to be from that place; one must also have the rigor for thoughtfulness as well as the dedication and character to engage one’s situation. In this sense Nelly Richard is certainly a Chilean and Latin American philosopher. Nelly Richard is a social critic and thinker who emigrated from France in 1970 when Salvador Allende’s popular front (unidad popular), the first socialist government democratically elected in the world, came to power. After the coup d’état of 1973, Richard remained in Chile in spite of the savage persecution of intellectuals perpetuated by the military regime. Indeed, she became an active part of the movements of resistance and critique against the narrative and actions of the military government. Her work first circulated in mimeographed copies, and her thought was passed by word of mouth during the military regime. Through her work she has become one of the major social critics in Latin America today. In her earlier work Richard emphasized the work of artists of the resistance like CADA (Colectivo de Acción de Arte), the artists’ action collective. Her work focused then—and her criticism does now—on the fragmentary character of the locus of enunciation in contemporary Latin American life. In her work the clear and transparent discourses of the systems of power and oppression become exposed to and juxtaposed with Latin American reality as she shines light on the fragmentary and ana-chronic presence of Latin American reality.34 Where values, meanings, and life are ordered and appeased by the rhetoric of democracy and neoliberalism, she breaks the mold of those fabricated meanings in order to expose and open a path for generating spaces in which the discarded memories and histories of distinct and excluded peoples may reappear. Her work is interdisciplinary in nature, crossing the boundaries of the modern, colonial system. She remains with the colonial difference, working the border thinking internal to her situation in Latin America and Chile. She conceives of her work as cultural critique or criticism, rather than in terms of cultural studies. That is, instead of studying about the fractured locus of enunciation, she engages in its experience through transformative criticism of works of art, a criticism that aims to alter the operative system’s versions

Fecund Undercurrents | 209 of reality.35 In order to begin to engage her work as a thinking in radical exteriority within a specific site of colonial difference, I will discuss her analysis of the weak reception in Chile of Ariel Dorfman’s Death of the Maiden and the contrast she sets up with the work of Alfredo Castro’s Teatro de la Memoria (Theater of Memory) in her book The Insubordination of Signs: Political Change, Cultural Transformation, and Poetics of the Crisis. Richard begins her discussion by problematizing the way memory is appropriated by the military dictatorship in an ordered chronological and logical narrative of development. Ultimately the past becomes objectified and allocated to a binary structure of winners and defeated. However, through the work of artists this seemingly continuous and singular narrative breaks down and may be displaced. But the arrangement of these meanings may find itself altered and de-composed, as the account and its narrative set in motion novel forms of recombining time and sequences, of alternating pauses and flashbacks, of anticipating endings and skipping over beginnings, through a reading that resists being so predictably subordinated to the chronology of linear time. Such a chronology keeps captive as past what is stored there, until certain temporal disjunctures release the nexuses in a programmed continuity. The present then becomes a disjunctive knot, capable of making recollection not a return to the past (a regression that buries history in the recesses of yesterday), but rather a coming and going along the winding turns of a memory that does not stop at fixed points, passing instead along a critical multidirectionality of nonpacted alternatives.36

Here Richard recognizes in a disjunctive reengagement of memory a site of delinking, which releases what has been covered over by the official story and its closure over distinct experiences and memories. As she goes on to explain, “Once one has discarded ‘the amnesiac smoothing out of history, which is among other things, an offence to the present,’ the work of memory may be reimagined.”37 When this happens, the subject who experiences passively objectified recollection becomes a dynamic memory subject “charged with the possibility of a creative engagement of the relations of past and present.”38 This happens not as the present consciousness meets an objectively ordered past but as one exposes and is exposed to “ties between past and present, in order to make explode that nowtime (Benjamin’s Jetzeit) retained and compressed within the historical particles of many discrepant recollections, previously silenced by an official memory.”39 The temporality that appears is that ana-chronic simultaneity that situates one’s consciousness in radical exteriority by virtue of the overlapping of asymmetric temporalities. Richard finds such moments of displacement in specific works of art. As Gonzalo Diaz (installation artist and professor of fine arts at Universidad de Chile) puts it when speaking of his installation about the Lonquén massacre in Chile, at such moments engagement occurs through “fragmented obscurities that we string together to illuminate an event” or through “a distortion that art

210 | Thinking from Radical Exteriority can barely name.”40 The work of art may accomplish a displacement of temporality by other means than those sought through the traditional modern, colonial ordering of time. Indeed, the acceleration of time and the primacy of progress that we found in Mignolo underlie the reconstruction of history under the military government in Chile. Still more dramatically, this continues once civil government is reinstituted and attempts are made to mend a society reaped apart by violence by appealing to linear history, order, progress, and the need for forgetting. Against such fiction, the instance of displacement does not work as an avant-garde strategy in art but as a mechanism of reconfiguration of a social fabric that no longer works because its memory has been buried under the modern, colonial project of a single historical line of progress. In her analysis of the plays by Dorfman and Castro, Richard contrasts the way memory is situated. Death of the Maiden was greatly successful in Europe and the United States, and eventually a major motion picture was made. The story tells of the encounter—years after the fact—between a woman who was tortured while imprisoned in the underground jails of the military regime and her torturer. As Richard shows, the relationship that orders the reengagement of past in the present through memory is one created by the official structuring of history: In Dorfman’s case, the problem of the role of memory was articulated through tropes that recited the political libretto of Chilean society during the democratic transition. . . . The theatrical subject matter revolved around the same dualities and oppositions that had been part of the rhetoric created by the human rights agenda: victim/victimizer, harm/reparation, offense/pardon, and so on.41

In this scenario the memory of the experience, the living affect, remains situated in the chronology of a past that has passed and a separate present. Moreover, memory is engaged through the binary system that, as we saw, dominates modern, colonial systems, where the either- or reduces experience to totalizing positions that ultimately exclude experience in the name of rational ordering: in the present, rational civility must respond to the savage past. By recovering the past through the rational present, a future becomes possible, and progress is accomplished. As a result, “No enunciative unsettling or significant rupture sought to disorganize the series of figurations by which history and memory were symbolized in accordance with the terms established by the dominant narrative.”42 In such a case the past remains ineffective, and memory appears as a passive effect on a subject who has no way of understanding the radical break that is now part of that person’s existence. Only the ordered present may deliver the past. In other words, to put it in terms of our previous discussion, the fractured locus of enunciation remains buried under a temporal narrative that ultimately turns experience and memory into a subaltern and subjugated knowledge. In striking contrast, as Richard shows, Alfredo Castro’s Teatro de la Memoria (Theater of Memory) presents a different expression and engagement that exposes

Fecund Undercurrents | 211 the fractured locus of enunciation and releases the creativity inherent in memory. Indeed, in his work Richard finds what we have called an insurrection of subjugated knowledge. As she begins to explain in a paragraph worth quoting and elaborating at length: “Alfredo Castro elaborated a ‘theater of memory’ spoken in a language crushed by the violent clashes and disconnections that had broken the sequential aspect of names and things.”43 The memory of violence is already explicit in the language’s inability to name without accusing the memory of the destruction in the naming. Unlike the gathering of sense into and out of one system of signification we found in the coloniality of power and knowledge, here the naming marks the undoing. The work speaks the fracture. Richard goes on, Castro’s syntactic disabling of referential discourse frustrates every identificatory projection (in contrast to what occurred in Dorfman) and subverted the dualistic axis of the negative-positive through diffuse ambivalence, through truncated phrases disarming the ideological-communicative conventions of the theatrical message with their erratic disputation.44

The interruption of syntax ruins the taxis of the system, precisely by no longer fitting the binary code (negative-positive, victim-victimizer, crime-reparation) that covers over and excludes the experience of memory and its ana-chonic and radical temporality (radical in that, when engaged in this active manner, memory becomes a site of distinct exteriority, critique, and transformation, rather than the objective fact of the passive victim). In the undoing of ordered discourse according to the single temporality of progress, the erratic figures an opening for meanings, narratives, forms of grief, and affirmations kept subjugated by the chronology of the system. “The archeology of memory in Castro’s theater made fragments of consciousness collide, juxtaposed in disorder, thereby preventing any meaning of history from resting in a precomposed structure.”45 In Castro’s work Richard finds the engagement with the diffused light, with the indirect insights, with the fragments and ana-chronic elements that compose memory and, when engaged, offer creative and transformative events of consciousness. And this happens precisely as Castro, and Richard in following him, enters the space of the colonial difference and engages the fractured locus of enunciation in concrete living experiences. Richard concludes: “Blind spots that demand an aesthetic diffused lighting, so that their forms acquire the indirect meaning of what is shown obliquely, of that which circulates along narrow paths of recollection, filtered by barely discernible fissures of consciousness.”46 What one finds through the fissures is the subjugated and excluded consciousness hidden by totalizing discourses, by binary thinking, and by the logic of rationalism. What becomes apparent and begins to arise in new life forms and narratives arises not from afar and in the form of salvation but from “interrupted sequences and inconclusive fragments still hidden in the seams of the triumphant discourses of reconstruction, in the folds and reverses that continue to distrust the glorious ends of the finished phrase and phase.”47

212 | Thinking from Radical Exteriority In this section we have discussed the disruption of the coloniality of time. I will now return to the issue of the coloniality of images in general and how one installation artist is able to displace the image from the coloniality of power and knowledge and the set of expectations and dispositions that seem to delimit all possible images in the case of the colonized and subaltern, as was the case in the example from Frantz Fanon.

The Displacing of the Coloniality of Images in Alfredo Jaar’s Installations The Liberating Displacement of Images Given the limitations of images under coloniality, it would seem that one’s possibility of seeing the world is also narrowed down to those specific framings of the phenomena that answer to the coloniality of power, knowledge, and thought. In other words, we live in a world that, although flooded with images, is image-poor when one considers the limitations of vision. The visible is but a function of those expectations that organize any possible image. One goes about the world as a thinking thing, an object that then sees other objects. One spends hours watching images on television that visually repeat the same formula, pictures of people speaking (speaking shadows). As Gadamer puts it so well in The Relevance of the Beautiful, at least since the Middle Ages and the advent of Christianity, the work of art has had its justification and sense founded in language.48 Images will answer to the expectations of a world organized around modern rational subjectivity and its investment and development as a universal project of knowledge defined by language. This, of course, is not the case for certain European artists, such as Artaud, Beuys, and Picasso. Of the three, the latter seems the most contrary to my claim. But if one pauses for a moment to consider his work, it is immediately evident that he does not simply repeat the production of expected images, of what may be seen as an image. Rather, from his cubist period on, his work seems to tag, deform, rip, and shatter traditional perception. And he does so without abandoning the rational world but rather by reconfiguring it, putting together pieces into constructions that seem simply at odds with what the world should look like. I believe this process of displacement may have the creative effect Nelly Richard recognizes in Castro’s work, particularly for the sake of overcoming the coloniality of images. More than once Picasso remarks on the fact that he does not make images but goes against them.49 Picasso’s painting figures a perpetual destruction of images, which leads to other unexpected visual experiences. Moreover, the images Picasso presents do not only upset one’s expectations of what an image is supposed to show; with their disparate appearing, his works also displace the viewer’s gaze. What is most upsetting about Picasso is that one cannot look away, and that looking disturbs one’s parameters of visibility. It is “I,” the viewer, who ultimately

Fecund Undercurrents | 213 must learn to see again. Therefore, Picasso’s work does not merely present a new image; its shock to date and its legacy are that his work requires, brutally forces, the viewer to go beyond the expectations of knowledge and power that order the very possibility of saying what is and what is not an image. Looking at Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907) is still today an unpleasant and unacceptable experience for most people, not because of the image but because of the violation of the order of knowledge and the displacement of the viewer’s gaze that occur at the monstrous confrontation with that larger-than-life flesh-colored canvas. Looking at Guernica (1937), one finds the gestures of hundreds of years of painting turned inside out, as the comfort of oil paintings turns to the discomfort of a shock that forces one to think again, that forces a transformation of consciousness by means of the displacement of traditional forms. In our sophisticated, consumer-driven world, millions of people will look at those canvases. They will be endlessly photographed and reproduced, but only to make an image of something as unlikely as a painted body, a mask, or a teacup for a ceremony. And the evidence of the impossibility to absorb the displacement of the image and viewer is that, in spite of all the reproductions, nothing in public images today, nothing in popular newspapers, magazines, television shows, or Hollywood movies, looks like Picasso’s works. Of the millions of images one sees a year, most of them will remain repetitions of the framed image under the framing order of knowledge. We find the displacement of images also at work in Luis Buñuel’s filmmaking. The Cuban cinematographer Nestor Almendros, one of the legends of cinematography in the history of filmmaking, tells a revealing story about Buñuel’s sense of images.50 According to Almendros, he would spend hours preparing the lighting and setting the shot. Then, Buñuel would arrive, turn the camera 180 degrees, and begin to shoot the scene. It is this gesture of dis-enframing that organizes my discussion. Buñuel’s gesture resulted in at least two crucial elements for our discussion: in turning the camera Buñuel would begin from what would otherwise remain exterior, invisible, in the periphery of the scene. Furthermore, in that same gesture, the scene would be displaced and brought into another context in which it would emerge in ways neither Almendros nor Buñuel could control or predetermine. In short, Buñuel’s gesture was liberatory for the image, forming an opening for that which did not have an already determined place but certainly was at play in the periphery of Almendros’s preset image. One may point to this gesture in contrast to the poverty of images under coloniality. In the turning of the camera, a displacement of image and background occurs, much as in Picasso’s painting and sculpture. But in the case of Buñuel, the displacement is more explicit. The scene that has been set up, the space in which it may occur and be contextualized, and the visual parameters that respond to the requirements of the construction of the image are all violated as the actors are literally forced to appear under a different light. Anything can happen in that situation, and what

214 | Thinking from Radical Exteriority unfolds—and was at first to be an image in a controlled context—lives now from a tension founded in displacement. To say it yet in other words, by virtue of the displacement Buñuel escapes what Artaud suffered most about the modern theater, that is, the tyranny of the written script, the scripted word that would work like the coloniality of power and knowledge by predetermining, controlling, and naming life.51 The Displacement of Images from Their Eurocentric Configuration in Alfredo Jaar Artists like Picasso, Artaud, and Beuys only carry the principle of displacement I have been discussing to a limit. Their work is within their tradition, and their displacement of images occurs within a system of images that is almost canonical in its symbols and allusions. The principle of displacement takes a different form in the work of the Chilean conceptual artist and filmmaker Alfredo Jaar. Jaar’s displacement of images engages from radical exteriority directly the limits or expectations imposed by the coloniality of power and knowledge. Alfredo Jaar is perhaps best known in North America for his 1987 work “A Logo for America” in Times Square, New York. Jaar projected onto the central screen in Times Square a series of images. First appears the silhouette of the North American continent. Then, at the center of the silhouette and transgressing the borders of it, appears the sentence “this is not america.” This would be followed by the projection of a United States flag, which would then be filled with the words: “this is not america’s flag.” Then the word “america” would appear with images of North America, Central America, and South America at its center. This image would multiply to diversify the image of the three continents and the word “america.” Besides the obvious point, the series of images works to displace the popular conception of the United States as America. Moreover, in projecting this in the large screen in Times Square, at the heart of Manhattan, Jaar calls to mind the fact that the place where the viewer is standing is not what one had thought. Where is the viewer standing? What claim could the viewer make to America in the awareness of a colonizing gesture that has become so commonplace that, up to that moment, it had gone unnoticed? The exposure of an implicit and yet obvious colonizing position in the simple gesture of calling the United States “America” may serve as the occasion for reflection, or not. However, the image of America is no longer that of the United States, and the United States has lost its implicit claim over the Americas. Moreover, a question remains: Does America exist specifically somewhere? Jaar’s later work from 1994 to 2000 concerns the genocide in Rwanda, and it is a cycle titled The Rwanda Project. This cycle of works takes further the displacement of image, context, and viewer. During the retrospective of his work in Milan in 2008 titled It Is Difficult, some of the works from the cycle were presented

Fecund Undercurrents | 215 at the Spazio Oberdan. First of all, Jaar’s works do not offer a single image of the genocide itself. Instead, the images compose a large space within which the viewer moves. It is the space that is the work. The images that do appear are pictures of simple people (Epilogue [1998]); of two children embracing each other as they look on at an undefined public event (Embrace [1996]); and of fields, tree lines, and a church steeple under pure blue skies (Field, Road, Cloud [1997]). These passages never suggest directly the violence that has taken place. They do not answer to the requirement of the spectator for an image already constructed and delivered as a complete fact. In contrast to the images, the words in the exhibition point directly to the genocide, by documenting the increasing number of deaths over the long period of events and by telling what happened to one particular family. In Searching for Africa in LIFE (1996), Jaar shows a mosaic-like wall of images from the covers of LIFE magazine that covers the period from 1936 to 1996. The viewer is invited to look for Africa in those thousands of covers. The colonizing gaze and disregard for Africa’s reality become obvious given the images of exoticism, animal life, and “savage” beauty. This is also accentuated by another work, From Time to Time (2006). The disregard for Africa’s reality becomes powerfully explicit in Untitled (Newsweek) (1994). In this work Jaar shows the covers of Newsweek during the months of the genocide and the absolute disregard for what has been happening (from April to August, 1994). The factual weekly numbers of the deaths are placed under the glossy covers of the weekly magazine. Africa appears here not in images but in the absence of its representation. The juxtaposition of words and images from Western mass media makes this explicit. In The Eyes of Gutete Emerita (installation, 1996), Jaar once again displaces image and word by telling us about Gutete Emerita’s story and then offering us not images of what she has seen but a million slides on a light table. Gutete Emerita, at thirty years old, saw her husband and her two children massacred in front of her eyes during Mass at the church of Ntarama in Rwanda. The story of the family is made of words that lead not to matching images but to a light table covered with thousands of copies of one single image, an image one only sees by leaning over and looking through a magnifying lens at a single slide. There one encounters her gaze, the gaze of a survivor looking back. There is nothing to see except that gaze. There are no images for what she has seen, for her experience, and yet one does stand with her gaze. With this cycle of works Jaar accomplishes something analogous to Picasso’s Guernica, in that he manages to use the commonplace materials of popular culture today to create a moment of profound transformation of consciousness. But Jaar has gone further, since he has created not an image but a space that cannot be made into an image to serve the economy of the coloniality of power, knowledge, and thought and its pernicious temporality. In the space there is no image of the genocide; the images from mass media prove misleading, and the words

216 | Thinking from Radical Exteriority recall nothing that may be delivered to the objective, rational spectator, except for the awareness of the absence of images in Western mass media for Africa and those massacred. There is not an image to be colonized, and the colonizing images in LIFE and Newsweek have been exposed. This absence creates a second effect. Without the image or object to see and appropriate, one’s place—that rational, objective position with its expectations—becomes obvious. Furthermore, whatever does appear will ultimately have to do with the viewer as much as with those fragments that compose the space. The word “nigger” will be one’s own word; the mystification, the idealization, the indifference toward other distinct lives perpetuated in one’s comfort will be one’s exposed action. Here the image has been displaced from the pornographic expectation, and the objective mind has been displaced from its complacency. What remains? One’s gaze has found a mirror—a most damning image, the gaze of the damned that no longer stands outside of one’s “objective” viewing and comprehension, outside of one’s claim to objective (untouchable) rationality and humanity. It is here that the coloniality of time no longer holds, as one stands in the colonial difference (to use Mignolo’s term). The gaze is now constituted by a consciousness exposed to its own radical exteriority. This consciousness must reconfigure itself in light of what it comes to see, having being exposed to its role in the configuration of the image. The temporality of this experience does not allow for a claim of having a position beyond the fact of the gaze. One finds oneself in an originary temporality in which past and future hold together in a decisive present shared by Gutete Emerita’s gaze and one’s own gaze. There is no possible escape into a present that would relegate the experience of Gutete Emerita to a savage, uncivilized past. Indeed, if there is something savage and profoundly disturbing to be found, it is the images from Western mass media; it is the abandonment of our reality to images that do not allow us to see that reality and articulate it. As Quijano explains in the quotation at the beginning of our discussion, the colonized suffer under the distorting Eurocentric images they identify with their own existence. As we have seen, these images are sustained by a system of power and knowledge that effectively exploits, destroys, suppresses, judges, ignores, and ultimately condemns to nonexistence what is distinct. In light of Jaar’s work, the damned is in us; she/he now gazes at his/her self and begins to see that those images that once framed existence at a distance will no longer serve as knowledge, comfort, or an alibi.

It Is Difficult: Toward World Philosophies through Decolonial Aesthetics In the last two sections we engaged moments of displacement in which one finds a possibility for the liberation of images from the coloniality of power, knowledge, temporality, and thought. In Nelly Richard’s analysis as well as in Alfredo Jaar’s It Is Difficult, images are displaced from this order from outside the Euro-

Fecund Undercurrents | 217 centric, Western, hegemonic gaze. This occurs because the themes, structures, and very possibility of knowledge and representation have been altered and are no longer operative in terms of the rule of coloniality. What happens to our sense of images in this engagement from the periphery? If the discussion in this closing chapter has had any success, one is left with the possibility of not only looking for new configurations of images but finding leeway for an open time-space out of which one may give articulation to other forms of knowledge, with a sense of lived, embodied thought in radical exteriority. However, in this freedom one always remains aware of the overwhelming flood of ready-made colonizing images, of the coloniality of power, knowledge, time, and vision, which more often than not seem to almost secure our existential blindness toward the distinct lives that offer unsuspected new paths toward world philosophies. In this closing chapter I have wanted to introduce a dimension of liberatory and decolonial thought in Latin America that remains to be developed. As we have seen, the question of aesthetic experience underlies the last hundred years of a thinking that seeks liberation and the articulation of distinct ways of being which, in ana-chronic, overlapping movements, configure what comes to be called “Latin America.” The ways of thinking and issues brought forth by CastroGómez (chapter 8) and Mignolo as well as the thinking we have found in Lugones and Maldona-Torres (chapter 9) and Richard and Jaar (in the present chapter) point toward paths that already begin to map out and take flight toward world philosophies. In exposing the limits as well as the possibilities that begin to appear with a decolonial aesthetic thinking, we have found a shared lived timespace with the indigenous, with the Afro-Caribbean, with the criollo and mestiza lives, with European lineages and traditions, with the articulate thought of those many cultural groups that form and that are forming in the Americas. Perhaps now, we may begin to move forward toward a sense of philosophy and community in our unfathomable and vital human situation, in our difficulty, and in our vitality, instead of withdrawing into our most guarded and well-informed exclusive solitudes.

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NO T E S

Introduction 1. Jorge J. E. Gracia, Latin American Philosophy for the Twenty-First Century (New York: Prometheus Books, 1986). Jorge J. E. Gracia and Elizabeth Millán-Zaibert, Latin American Philosophy for the Twenty-First Century: The Human Condition, Values, and the Search for Identity (New York: Prometheus Books, 2004). Eduardo Mendieta, Latin America and Postmodernity: A Contemporary Reader (New York: Humanity Press, 2001). Eduardo Mendieta, Latin American Philosophy: Currents, Issues, Debates (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003). Susana Nucettelli and Gary Seay, Latin American Philosophy: An Introduction with Readings (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson, 2003). Susana Nucettelli, Ofelia Schutte, and Octavio Bueno, A Companion to Latin American Philosophy (Singapore: Blackwell, 2010). 2. Throughout this work I employ a series of phrases to identify aspects of “modern Western thought.” The longest phrase that spells the main characteristics I distinguish in my reading of Western modernity is “Western modern instrumental, rationalist, productive, and subjectivist thought.” “Instrumental” refers to the use of reason as a tool of comprehension, conquest, manipulation, determination, and production of meanings throughout existence. “Rationalist” refers to the idea that all meaning depends on and is born from rational logical thought as understood by Western European and North American thinkers. This is a thinking determined by the particular needs of the coloniality of power and knowledge in its hegemonic economic unfolding and perpetuation. In such a version of rationalism, the ego cogito is the site, origin, and judge of all senses of being human and otherwise. This does not mean that rationality is to be dismissed. On the contrary, once one has understood the fecund sense of exposing coloniality at large, it becomes possible to expand the sense of rationality by engaging and thinking out of and with the excluded ways of being and giving articulation to distinct existences that overflow Western rationalism. “Productive” refers to the project of infinite production of knowledge and meaning that goes hand in hand with the rationalist and instrumental view of existence. The expansion of rational knowledge depends on infinite production of meaning. This has a direct economic sense, in that rationalist, instrumental thought develops with and underlies the unfolding of liberalism, neoliberalism, and globalizing projects that aim at controlling economic production in its form and content throughout the world. “Subjectivist” points to the egocentric situation of modern thought since all senses of existence revolve around the ego cogito, the Western rational subject, who in order to be free must remain fundamentally an individual (in contrast to subjectivities and intersubjectivities in native American cultures, for example). Another term attached to this problematic is “Westernizing.” This term refers to the coloniality of power and knowledge and modern rationalism outside as well as inside non-Western countries. Indeed, “modernity” in this

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220 | Notes to Pages 3–7 context and throughout my discussion refers to structures that for the most part occur not from outside dominated and dependent countries but from within. This leads to another term along these lines: “colonized consciousness.” This refers to the way of thinking that orients itself in terms of modern Western rationalism and its project as just outlined. Also, when I write “universal” I mean to identify a centralized hegemonic thinking (“uni” meaning one). When I write “pluri-versal” I am speaking of philosophies and dialogues that arise out of alterity and temporalizing dynamic movements that unsettle hegemonic thought. 3. Among the thinkers who have influenced my thought on this issue are Fanon, Heidegger, Foucault, Dussel, and Aníbal Quijano. 4. I do so with the proviso that these figures are not taken to be monumental individuals who are part of a single history of philosophy but rather voices that open spaces for the articulation of histories that have been excluded, forgotten, or purposely destroyed. In other words, this path I articulate is not the “capital H” history of Latin America’s greatest philosophers but rather the marking of moments that overlap today and together constitute possible occasions for decolonizing knowledge, epistemic frames, and bodies for the sake of affirming peoples’ distinct lives. 5. In his time Bolívar was one of the major figures in the first wave of American revolutions. As such, he was also a criollo, a son of Europeans mixed with indigenous blood, who waged war against Spain in the name of a freedom that in many ways was limited to the children of Europe. It is worth mentioning by contrast the one revolution that included directly and represented the indigenous and peoples of African descent, the Haitian revolution, which began with the slave rebellion of 1791 and ended with a short-lived victory and independence in 1801–1804. This direct involvement of peoples of African descent and natives is why, when asked about the beginnings of the Cuban revolution, Fidel would cite the Haitian revolution rather than the events of 1953. But Bolívar appears again today, this time under the name given to the new political movements and reappropriation of inter-subjective relations in Latin America: la revolución bolivariana. Along with many others, this name points to the Zapatista movement and the changes in Venezuela and Bolivia that see the indigenous and the oppressed become protagonists in their own liberation. In evoking the great libertador’s name, these changes remind us of his call for a united America without nationalist frontiers, but they also reinscribe and translate the first criollo revolutions into a broader and deeper moment, one that arises from the excluded of the Americas and in which they find their agency and the challenges that come with it. 6. The term “aesthetic” refers to works of art as well as to oral traditions, public festivals, and manifestations. It is also used for dimensions of fear, loss, trauma, anxiety, and involuntary memory as well as joy, release, and attentive synesthetic listening. (I have developed this sense of philosophical thought in my previous work Sense and Finitude [Albany: SUNY Press, 2009]. This title is a rather poor translation of its original title, a Spanish phrase untranslatable into English, which again points to the aesthetic dimension of thought found in being attentive to the inseparability of rational thought and embodied experiences or knowledge: “el pensamiento sentido”). 7. The term “radical exteriority” refers to a thinking and existence beyond Western comprehension, control, and determination; to the living, articulate configurations of

Notes to Page 8 | 221 lives previously excluded, oppressed, exploited and silenced, from which a sound philosophical thought arises; to the space that opens for critical thought from outside the Western modern tradition, which one finds in engaging such thought; and to the characteristic alterity in philosophical thought, once one sees that philosophy (like all other creative endeavors) is never simply the sum of subjective historical and material situations. Philosophical thought is always a movement that in its arising is passing away. It is a transitory movement, and it is “utopian” in its dynamic (in the sense of an engagement of the present in transgression of the operative representations of existence). 8. “Coloniality of power and knowledge” is Aníbal Quijano’s term to identify and expose the racist economic system of power and knowledge that develops in the sixteenth century in the Americas and through the Atlantic trade. This system is later imported by Europe to the East and becomes eighteenth-century colonialism. The system of power and knowledge remains in play to date and underlies neoliberal globalism; in this sense, when I use “coloniality” I mean to point out the situation of those living under that system. This leads to another clarification: There is a marked difference between post-coloniality understood as the end of the classic nineteenth-century colonial periods and postcoloniality or decoloniality as understood out of the ongoing system of coloniality of power and knowledge. At the same time, both post-colonial studies and decoloniality overlap in many concerns and approaches. (See Ramón Grosfoguel’s careful differentiation in “The Epistemic Decolonial Turn: Beyond Political-Economy Paradigms,” Cultural Studies Vol. 21, Nos. 2–3, March–May 2007, p. 220.) It should also be kept in mind that throughout the book, in following Quijano’s genealogy, I take modernity and the rise of the ego cogito to the center of universal human knowledge not to be the result of Descartes’s thought or of a Western invented Copernican revolution but to arise through the construction of the coloniality of power and knowledge. Modern Western rational subjectivity (the ego cogito) arises in an inseparable construction with coloniality; these are the two sides of modernity. From this follows that modernity must be understood as much larger than the Western interpretation of it. Given this broader sense, we are speaking of a modernity at large in that modernity in its fuller registers overflows and remains unbridled with respect to Western modern rationalism. This happens as histories, lineages, and lives previously excluded by the Western traditional account of modernity become apparent (for example, Islamic, indigenous, and Afro-Caribbean thought operative in the arising and moving forward of modernity). In these terms, “modernity” in Latin American thought does not mean the same as in contemporary Western philosophy. For Latin American thinkers modernity is not necessarily over, because modernity is made up of Western rationalism and the lives and ways of thinking obscured and suppressed by coloniality of power and knowledge. It follows from this that modernity is still at play in pernicious as well as eruptive concrete ways. Moreover, inasmuch as postmodernity concerns the Western understanding of modernity, postmodernity may be seen as Eurocentric (Dussel). Therefore, the term “modern” at times refers to a broad and open-ended project and at times to modernity as understood by modern Western thought and its history. 9. Aníbal Quijano, “Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Social Classification,” in Coloniality at Large: Latin America and the Postcolonial Debate, ed. Mabel Moraña, Enrique Dussel, and Carlos A. Jáuregui (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 190.

222 | Notes to Pages 8–13 10. This issue of simultaneity is taken by Quijano from José Carlos Mariátegui, who develops the idea with respect to economy in Latin America in his Seven Interpretative Essays on Peruvian Reality (El Paso: University of Texas Press, 1971.) 11. “Aesthetic thinking” relates to temporality in two main ways. First of all, the temporality that underlies the modern system of power and knowledge in Western modern thought is shown to be a pre-rational, aesthetic experience delimiting all possibilities of knowledge and determinations of senses of beings. At the same time, the distinct asymmetric simultaneity of overlapping temporalities found in Latin American experience and thought interrupts the Western rationalist account of being. As a result philosophy finds itself open to other ways of thinking that invite the violation of canonical divisions of fields of study. More importantly, aesthetic thinking interrupts the primacy of the rational over the irrational and thus invites a thinking that does not separate embodied knowledge from rational thought. In short, one is invited to engage in heart-mind thinking (to use a Chinese expression). Aesthetic thinking, then, points to affective experience as well as to the body, to embodied concrete experiences, which are pre-rational in the sense that they do not follow the productive logic of modern rationalism. Again, “aesthetic” refers to works of art as well as to oral traditions, public festivals, and manifestations and also to dimensions of fear, loss, trauma, anxiety, involuntary memory, joy, release, and attentive synesthetic listening. 12. Santiago Castro-Gómez, Crítica de la razón latinoamericana (Barcelona: Puvill Libros, 1996). 13. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (New York: Grove University Press, 1967). I develop this argument in chapter 10 of the present book. 14. Miguel León-Portilla, Aztec Thought and Culture: A Study of the Ancient Nahuatl Mind, trans. Jack Emory Davis (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1990). Pre-Columbian Literature of Mexico, trans. Grace Lobanov (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1969). Time and Reality in the Thought of the Maya, trans. Francis La Fiesche (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1990). The Broken Spear: The Aztec Account of the Conquest of Mexico, trans. Lysander Kemp (Boston: Beacon Press, 2006). La filosofía Náhuatl (México: 1956.) Visión de los vencidos, relaciones indígenas de la conquista (México: 2006). 15. See, among other works, Günther Rodolfo Kusch, Indigenous and Popular Thinking in América, trans. María Lugones (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010). La seducción de la barbarie: análisis herético de un continente mestizo (Rosario, Argentina: Edit. Fundación Ross, 1983). El pensamiento indígena y popular en América, 3rd ed. (Buenos Aires: Hachette, 1977). La negación en el pensamiento popular (Buenos Aires: Cimarrón, 1975). Geocultura del hombre americano (Buenos Aires: F. García Cambeiro, 1976). Indios, porteños y dioses, 2nd ed. (Buenos Aires: Stilcograff, 1994). Esbozo de una antropología filosófica americana (Buenos Aires: Castañeda, 1978). His complete works are collected in four volumes under the title Obras completas (Rosario, Argentina: Editorial Fundación Ross, 1998–2003). I should also point out the work of Josef Estermann, as exemplefied in his collection of essays titled Si el sur fuera el norte: chakanas interculturales entre Andes y Occidente (Quito, Ecuador: Ediciones Abya-Yala, 2008). 16. Enrique Leff, “Latin American Environmental Thinking,” in “South American Environmental Philosophy,” special issue, Environmental Ethics, Vol. 34, No. 4, Winter 2012, pp. 431–450.

Notes to Pages 13–20 | 223 17. Eduardo Mendieta and Linda Martín Alcoff, Identities: Race, Class, Gender, and Nationality (Hong Kong: Blackwell, 2003). Ada María Isasi-Díaz and Eduardo Mendieta, Decolonizing Epistemologies: Latina/o Theology and Philosophy (New York: Fordham University Press, 2011). Mariana Ortega and Linda Martín Alcoff, Constructing the Nation: A Race and Nationalism Reader (Albany: SUNY Press, 2009). Jorge J. E. Gracia, Hispanic/Latino Identity: A Philosophical Perspective (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 1999). Jorge J. E. Gracia, Race or Ethnicity? On Black and Latino Identity (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007.) Jorge J. E. Gracia, Forging People: Race, Ethnicity, and Nationality in Hispanic American and Latino/a Thought (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2011.) 18. Gregory Fernando Pappas, Pragmatism in the Americas (New York: Fordham University Press, 2011). Eduardo Mendieta, “Which Pragmatism? Whose America?” in Cornel West: A Critical Reader, ed. George Yancy (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2002). 19. Linda Martín Alcoff and Eduardo Mendieta, Thinking from the Underside of History (New York: Roman and Littlefield, 2000). Enrique Dussel, Beyond Philosophy: Ethics, History, Marxism, and Liberation Theology, ed. Eduardo Mendieta (New York: Roman and Littlefield, 2003). 20. Linda Martín Alcoff, Epistemology: The Big Questions (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1998). Linda Martín Alcoff, Visible Identities: Race, Gender and the Self (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.) Particularly in relation to decoloniality, see Chela Sandoval, Methodology of the Oppressed (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000); María Lugones, Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes: Theorizing Coalition against Multiple Oppressions (New York: Roman and Littlefield, 2003). 21. See also Raúl Fornet-Betancourt, Mujer y filosofía en el pensamiento iberoamericano: momentos de una relación difícil (Barcelona: Anthropos, 2009). 22. See also Walter Mignolo, The Idea of Latin America (Singapore: Blackwell, 2007), pp. 95–148. 23. Dina V. Picotti, La presencia africana en nuestra identidad (Buenos Aires: Ediciones Del Sol, 1998). On the issue of how to understand the contemporary situation, see also Dina V. Picotti, “La utopía americana de la propia emergencia civilizadora,” Agora Philosophica: Revista Marplatense de Filosofía, Vol. 10, No. 19–20, 2009, pp.158–175. 24. See note 1 to this chapter, above. 25. Elizabeth Millán-Zaibert and Arleen Salles, The Role of History in Latin American Philosophy: New Perspectives (New York: SUNY Press, 2005). 26. Franco Cassano, Il pensiero meridiano (Roma: Laterza & Figli, 1999). In English, Franco Cassano, Southern Thoughts and Other Essays on the Mediterranean, trans. Norman Bouchard and Valerio Ferme (New York: Fordham University Press, 2011). See also “Il pensiero meridiano oggi: Intervista e dialoghi con Franco Cassano,” California Italian Studies, Vol. 1, No. 1, 2010.

1. The Question of a Latin American Philosophy and Its Identity 1. Simón Bolívar, “Jamaica Letter: Reply of a South American to a Gentleman of this Island (Jamaica),” in Latin American Philosophy for the Twenty-First Century, ed. Jorge J. E. Gracia and Elizabeth Millán (New York: Prometheus Books, 2004), 63–66. Henceforth cited as “JL.”

224 | Notes to Pages 20–22 2. JL, 63. 3. JL, 64. 4. The Spanish renders the full sentiment in a way worth quoting: Nosotros somos un pequeño género humano; poseemos un mundo aparte, cercado por dilatados mares; nuevos en casi todas las artes y ciencias, aunque en cierto modo viejos en los usos de la sociedad civil. Yo considero el estado actual de la América, como cuando desplomado el imperio romano, cada desmembración formó un sistema político, conforme a sus intereses y situación, o siguiendo la ambición particular de algunos jefes, familias, o corporaciones; con esta notable diferencia que aquellos miembros dispersos volvían a restablecer sus antiguas naciones con las alteraciones que exigían las cosas o los sucesos; mas nosotros, que apenas conservamos vestigios de lo que en otro tiempo fue, y que por otra parte, no somos indios, ni europeos, sino una especie media entre los legítimos propietarios del país, y los usurpadores españoles; en suma, siendo nosotros americanos por nacimiento, y nuestros derechos los de Europa, tenemos que disputar estos a los del país, y que mantenernos en él contra la invasión de los invasores; así nos hallamos en el caso más extraordinario y complicado. No obstante que es una especie de adivinación indicar cuál será el resultado de la línea de política que la América siga, me atrevo a aventurar algunas conjeturas que desde luego caracterizo de arbitrarias, dictadas por mi deseo racional, y no por un raciocinio probable. La posición de los moradores del hemisferio americano ha sido por siglos puramente pasiva; su existencia política era nula. Nosotros estábamos en un grado todavía más abajo de la servidumbre, y por lo mismo con más dificultad para elevarnos al goce de la libertad. Permítame V. estas consideraciones para elevar la cuestión. Los estados son esclavos por la naturaleza de su constitución o por el abuso de ella; luego, un pueblo es esclavo cuando el gobierno, por su esencia o por sus vicios, holla y usurpa los derechos del ciudadano o súbdito. Aplicando estos principios, hallaremos que la América no solamente estaba privada de su libertad, sino también de la tiranía activa y dominante. Me explicaré. (Simón Bolívar, Carta de Jamaica [Editores El Aleph: www.elaleph .com]). 5. It should be noted that Charles Darwin was informed about this campaign and sought Rosas in order to meet him. Darwin would report of the general in his genocidal campaign: “[Rosas] has a most predominant influence in the country, which it seems will use to its prosperity and advancement.” Charles Darwin, “Chapter IV: Rio Negro to Bahia Blanca,” in The Voyage of the Beagle (New York: Dover Publications, 2011). 6. Today most people do not know or believe that there was such presence of African origins in Argentina, in spite of the fact that the fundaments of tango as a dance are the candombe and milonga rhythms from the colored neighborhoods of Buenos Aires like Montserrat, today the site of the Casa Rosada, the equivalent of the White House. 7. Simón Bolívar, “Address Delivered at the Inauguration of the Second National Congress of Venezuela at Angostura,” in Latin American Philosophy for the Twenty-First Century, ed. Jorge J. E. Gracia and Elizabeth Millán (New York: Prometheus Books, 2004), 70–71.

Notes to Pages 22–25 | 225 8. “The soul equal and eternal emanates from bodies of various shapes and colors. Whoever foments and spreads antagonism and hate between the races sins against humanity. . . . The self-evident facts of the problem should not be obscured, because the problem can be resolved, for the peace of centuries to come, by appropriate study, and by the tacit and immediate unity in the continental spirit.” José Martí, “Our America,” in Latin American Philosophy for the Twenty-First Century, ed. Jorge J. E. Gracia and Elizabeth Millán (New York: Prometheus Books, 2004), 252. 9. One fundamental source for my reading has been Ofelia Schutte’s extensive treatment of Zea throughout her groundbreaking work, Cultural Identity and Social Liberalism in Latin American Thought (Albany: SUNY Press, 1993). 10. Leopoldo Zea, “En torno a la filosofía americana,” Cuadernos americanos Vol. 3, 1942, 63–78; En torno a una filosofía americana (México: El Colegio de México, 1945); “Filosofía de lo americano” (México: Nueva Imagen, 1984), 34–49. “The Actual Function of Philosophy in Latin America,” in Latin American Philosophy in the Twentieth Century (New York: Prometheus, 1986), 223. The actual title of the essay is “Concerning (en torno a) Latin American Philosophy.” The issue is not the actual function of but the sense and existence of Latin American philosophy. I will use “CLAP” to indicate this text. Unless indicated otherwise with the words “my translation,” I will use the available English translation, and I will refer to the Spanish original as it appears in Leopoldo Zea, “En torno a la filosofía americana,” Cuadernos americanos Vol. 3, 1942, 63–78, www.ensayistas.org/antologia/XXA/zea. 11. “Negritud and indigenism are ideological [historical] concepts that have their origin in a situation common to the people of Negro Africa and Afroamerica on the one hand and Latin America and Indoamerica on the other: the situation of dependency . . . a situation created by Europe, and the so-called Western world.” Leopoldo Zea, “Negritud e indigenismo,” in La Filosofía como compromiso de liberación (Venezuela: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1991), 297. My translation. 12. Leopoldo Zea, Discurso desde la marginación y la barbarie (Barcelona: Anthopos, 1988). 13. Leopoldo Zea, Discurso desde la marginación y la barbarie (Barcelona: Anthopos, 1988), 11. 14. “Lo que nos inclina hacia Europa y al mismo tiempo se resiste a ser Europa, es lo propio nuestro, lo americano.” CLAP, 3, my translation. I should add here the two translations available in English, which I believe show two currents in the interpretation of the sense of American philosophy today, although both do so by changing and adding to the original text of Zea. In Latin American Philosophy in the Twentieth Century, page 360, Jorge J. E. Gracia translates this sentence as: “What is properly ours, what is Latin American” whereas in Zea’s words “Latin America” does not appear directly and can only be added by interpreting “America” as Latin America. In this case the tendency is to recognize and emphasize the search for something particularly Latin American in the words of Zea. This emphasis extends throughout the translation, as is clear from the translation of the essay’s title, “En torno a una filosofía americana,” as “The Actual Function of Philosophy in Latin America.” In the translation by Robert Pegada in The Oxford Book of Latin American Essays, the sentence reads, “What inclines us towards Europe and at the same time resists being European is something peculiarly ours, the spirit of America” (263–

226 | Notes to Page 25 264). Here “the spirit of America” is simply added. Thus, although accurate structurally and in most of its terms, the translation is completed by adding a distinctly North American flavor to it. In this case Zea is interpreted not only as speaking of all the Americas but as doing so in terms of a certain “spirit.” These differences are crucial, since this sentence sets the direction of the very task of the essay, i.e., it sets our understanding of the concerns that situate American thought. Furthermore, in both interpretations a certain ambiguity in the term “America” (an ambiguity that is part of Zea’s thought) is resolved, and the issue as crucial today as in 1942, that of what is singular to “America,” is simply neglected. 15. I speak of an existential turn in two specific senses. First, Zea begins his essay by pointing to the famous work of Samuel Ramos entitled Profile of Man and Culture in Mexico (trans. Peter G. Earl [Austin: University of Texas Press, 1062]) (CLAP, 357–358.) In this work Ramos gives a critique of the way Mexicans understand themselves. Octavio Paz will also follow this critical tradition, along with Zea and Ramos, in his famous The Labyrinth of Solitude (New York: Grove Press, 1994). The second aspect of this turn involves the influence of Ortega and of his pupil José Gaos on the thought of Leopoldo Zea. Behind Zea’s sense of a thought situated in Latin American reality and his critique of Latin American consciousness stands Ortega’s famous statement “I am I and my circumstance” (Mario Sáenz, The Identity of Liberation in Latin American Thought: Latin American Thought and the Phenomenology of Leopoldo Zea (New York: Lexington Books, 1999), 83–84; 277. 16. “El americano se siente europeo por su origen, pero inferior a éste por su circunstancia. . . . Siente desprecio por lo americano y resentimiento contra lo europeo.” Leopoldo Zea, “En torno a la filosofía americana.” My translation. 17. Zea gives an extended discussion of his views in his book Latinoamérica: emancipación y neocolonialismo (Venezuela: Tiempo Nuevo, 1971), which he dedicates to the question of the relationship between the Latin America and Anglo-Saxon North America. 18. “Norte-América se ha empeñado en ser una segunda Europa, una copia en grande. No importa la creación propia, lo que importa es realizar los modelos europeos en grande y con la máxima perfección. Todo se reduce a números: tantos dólares o tantos metros. En el fondo lo único que se quiere hacer con esto es ocultar un sentimiento de inferioridad. El norteamericano trata de demostrar que tiene tanta capacidad como el europeo, y la forma de demostrarlo es haciendo, en grande y con mayor perfección técnica, lo mismo que ha hecho el europeo.” Leopoldo Zea, “En torno a la filosofía americana.” 19. “Pero con esto no ha demostrado capacidad cultural, sino simplemente técnica; puesto que la capacidad cultural se demuestra en la solución que se da a los problemas que se plantean al hombre en su existencia, y no en la imitación mecánica de soluciones que otros hombres se han dado a sí mismos en problemas que les son propios.” Leopoldo Zea, “En torno a la filosofía americana.” We might think of the single quantitative logic that takes over the Western tradition, which Heidegger came to call already in the late thirties “Machenschaft.” 20. The complications with this criticism are many, and although this is not the place to discuss them in detail, one must at least keep in mind its background. Zea’s sense of a lack of civilization in the development of the United States echoes the feeling that begins with

Notes to Pages 26–28 | 227 the Spanish American War, i.e., with the direct involvement of U.S. Marines with the socalled “liberation of Cuba” early in 1898, which was viewed by many Latin Americans as the U.S. invasion of Cuba and Puerto Rico. On May 2, 1889, the French-Argentine philosopher Paul Groussac gives a lecture in Buenos Aires likening the relationship between Latin Americans and North Americans to that between Ariel and Caliban in Shakespeare’s Tempest. As Rubén Darío himself (the father of modernism in Latin America) explains in his review for El Tiempo of Buenos Aires on May 20, 1898: “Ariel represents the light and creative Latin American spirit that follows the ways of French modernism, while Caliban represents the brute and uneducated violence of North American imperialism” (“El Triunfo de Calibán,” El Tiempo of Buenos Aires, May 20, 1898). “Rubén Darío combatiente,” El Cojo Ilustrado of Caracas, October 1, 1898. Cf. the versions in El Tiempo reproduced in Escritos inéditos (1938) and the version published in El modernismo visto por los modernistas (1980). One year later in 1900 appears this idea fully developed in a book titled Ariel, by the Uruguayan writer José Rodó (Buenos Aires: Losada, 1994), a work that will mark the trajectory of many Latin American intellectuals in the twentieth century. 21. Mario Sáenz, The Identity of Liberation in Latin American Thought: Latin American Thought and the Phenomenology of Leopoldo Zea (New York: Lexington Books, 1999), 193. 22. Leopoldo Zea, La filosofía americana como filosofía sin más (Mexico: Siglo XXI Editores, 2010), 18. From here on indicated as “FASM.” All English texts are my translation. 23. Ibid. 24. “Queremos adaptar la circunstancia americana a una concepción del mundo que heredamos de Europa, y no adaptar esta concepción del mundo a la circunstancia americana.” Leopoldo Zea, “En torno a la filosofía americana.” 25. “Queramos o no, somos hijos de la Cultura Europea . . . pero así como sin renegar de nuestros padres tenemos una personalidad que hace que ninguno nos confunda con ellos, así también tendremos una personalidad cultural sin renegar de la cultura de la cual somos hijos. El ser conscientes de nuestras verdaderas relaciones con la Cultura Europea, elimina todo sentimiento de inferioridad, dando lugar a un sentimiento de responsabilidad. Es este el sentimiento que anima en nuestros días al hombre de América. . . . El hombre americano se sabe heredero de la Cultura occidental y reclama su puesto en ella. El puesto que reclama es el de colaborador.” Leopoldo Zea, “En torno a la filosofía americana.” 26. FASM, 39. 27. “Nuestra época se ha caracterizado por la ruptura entre las Ideas y la realidad. La cultura europea se encuentra en crisis debido a tal ruptura.” Leopoldo Zea, “En torno a la filosofía americana.” 28. As we well know, at least since Hegel, and explicitly in the last century and a half, European philosophers in departure from Nietzsche and Heidegger have clearly seen this rupture between life and idea as figured by the history of metaphysics. 29. FASM, 18–19. 30. To a large extent this sense of the creative value of the Western tradition for Latin America comes from the historicist existentialism of Ortega and José Gaos. 31. CLAP, 365. 32. CLAP, 365.

228 | Notes to Pages 28–32 33. “Tanto los temas que hemos llamado universales como los temas propios de la circunstancia americana se encuentran estrechamente ligados. Al tratar unos tenemos necesidad de tratar los otros. Los temas abstractos tendrán que ser vistos desde la circunstancia propia del hombre americano. Cada hombre verá de estos temas aquello que más se amolde a su circunstancia. Estos temas los enfocará desde el punto de vista de su interés, y este interés estará determinado por su modo de vida, por su capacidad o incapacidad, en una palabra, por su circunstancia. En el caso de América, su aportación a la filosofía de dichos temas estará teñida por la circunstancia americana.” Leopoldo Zea, “En torno a la filosofía americana”; CLAP, 365. 34. Zea, America en la historia, 11. 35. Zea, America en la historia, 12. A few paragraphs later he adds, “Originality is the only feature that must be imitated by America. America must imitate Europe in its capacity of originality. That is, in its capacity to confront its own reality in order to take conscience of its problems and seek adequate solutions.” “La originalidad es el único rasgo que debe ser imitado por América. América debe imitar a Europa en esa capacidad para ser original. Esto es, en su capacidad para enfrentarse a su propia realidad para tomar conciencia de sus problemas y buscar las soluciones adecuadas.” America en la historia, 13. Cf. 15, where Zea expands his idea: “originality, independence, sovereignty individual or national” (“originalidad, independencia y soberanía individual o nacional”). 36. CLAP, 364. 37. FASM, 38. 38. FASM, 17. 39. Leopoldo Zea, Discurso desde la marginación y la barbarie (Barcelona: Anthopos, 1988), 11. 40. América en la historia, 12. Filosofía de la historia americana (México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, ed. Tierra Firme, 1978). Here Zea speaks already of “descolonización,” understood as the reintroduction of discarded history into the present, a transformative movement of radical reinterpretation of reality. This does not occur in terms of a radical exteriority that puts in question Latin American dependency, and it calls for another thinking. Rather, the transformation occurs through the recognition of a dependency that occurs as a transformative reception of Western ideas (ibid., 16–17). 41. Zea explains: El iberoamericano a olvidado que la mayor forma de incorporarse, no a la historia europea u occidental, sino a la historia sin más, es imitar a esa misma historia en aquel aspecto que varios de los próceres de la emancipación mental de ibero América señalaban: la originalidad. Esto es, la capacidad para hacer de lo propio algo universal, valido para otros hombres en situación semejante a la propia. Conciencia que tuvo desde sus inicios el hombre occidental, que no solo se conformo con hacer validas sus expresiones concretas para hombres en situaciones semejantes a la suya, sino, inclusive, a hombres cuyas circunstancias podían serle diametralmente opuestas. Conciencia de la historia occidental que hizo de la situación concreta de este la situación valida para todos los hombres que aceptasen su subordinación a ella. Conciencia cuyas consecuencias fueron la subordinación a ella de pueblos que no habían tomado conciencia de si mismos, la conciencia de su propia historia (Zea, America en la historia, 32).

Notes to Pages 32–38 | 229 42. Ibid. 43. In chapter 1 of America en la historia, “La filosofía de la historia y América,” Zea traces this transformation with respect to the Americas. 44. “Para que los enajenados queden desajenados.” FASM, 23. 45. Zea, America en la historia, 30. 46. FASM, 48–49. 47. FASM, 49. 48. FASM, 49. 49. “El historicismo y las corrientes filosóficas que de él se derivaron permitieron a la filosofía latinoamericana una vuelta sobre sí misma. Una vuelta que plantearía una temática diversa de la filosofía occidental.” FASM, 69. 50. FASM, 65–68. On Sartre, 71. 51. Speaking of Plato, Aristotle, Marcus Aurelius, Epicurus, and Pascal, Zea concludes: “Alas, forms of philosophy that may be expressed the same in an orderly system, a maxim, a poem, an essay, in a theater piece or novel.” FASM, 25. 52. Ofelia Schutte puts it clearly: “The notion of humanity on which he [Zea] relies is basically a European construct, the mere addition of color or nationality as a qualifying circumstance to this ‘universal man’ will not be sufficient to legitimate indigenous and marginalized ethnic cultures on their own. The latter can only be legitimated in terms of the paradigms of freedom and self-determination developed by European philosophy.” Cultural Identity and Social Liberalism in Latin American Thought (Albany: SUNY Press, 1993), 127.

2. Existence and Dependency 1. Leopoldo Zea, La filosofía americana como filosofía sin más (Mexico: Siglo XXI Editores, 2010), 74–76. From here on indicated as “FASM.” All English texts are my translation. 2. See Ernesto Mayz Vallenilla, Ontologia del conocimiento (Caracas: Universidad Central de Venezuela, 1960); El problema de la Nada en Kant (Madrid: Editorial Revista de Occidente, 1965; Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, 1992; in German, Pfüllingen: Verlag Günther Neske, 1974; in French, Paris: L’Harmattan, 2000); Del hombre y su alienación (Caracas: Instituto Nacional de Cultura y Bellas Artes, 1966); Técnica y humanismo (Caracas: Universidad Simón Bolívar, 1972); Latinoamérica en la encrucijada de la técnica (Caracas: Universidad Simón Bolívar, 1976); Ernesto Mayz Vallenilla, Fundamentos de la meta-técnica (Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, 1990) Published in English under the title The Foundations Of Meta-Technics, trans. Carl Mitcham (Landham, MD: University Press of America, 2004). 3. Ernesto Mayz Vallenilla, El problema de América: Apuntes para una filosofía americana (Caracas, Venezuela: Equinoccio Universidad Simón Bolívar, 1992). Hereafter quoted as “PA.” 4. FASM, 76. 5. Mayz Vallenilla writes: ¿Cuál es ese origen de la experiencia americana de ser? En descubrirlo y esclarecerlo podría radicar el verdadero programa de una filosofía original. Sin duda alguna que para ello habría de tenerse en cuenta el factum de que el hombre americano se ha encontrado a sí mismo existiendo cabe un Nuevo Mundo y que

230 | Notes to Pages 38–43 ello ha jugado un preponderante papel en la aparición de su peculiar conciencia histórica. Pero abordar así la tarea sería reducir todo este intento a una mera labor historiográfica. Semejante proyecto—sólo de corte historiográfico y por ende, reflejo y hasta secundario—debería ir acompañado de una investigación más honda y radical. Tal sería una verdadera historiología de nuestro ser histórico. Remontarse al origen de la experiencia del ser que a su vez determina nuestra configuración histórica, quiere decir autodescubrir e iluminar nuestro más entrañable origen. En semejante labor podría radicar y desplegarse—como hemos dicho—el verdadero programa de una filosofía original, pues al ser patentizada en su origienaridad la experiencia ontológica del hombre americano, se abrirán nuevos campos para la determinación original del sentido de ser. (PA, 1–39). 6. PA, 73–77. 7. PA, 27–28. 8. PA, 53. 9. “Al ser patentizada en su origienaridad la experiencia ontológica del hombre americano, se abrirán nuevos campos para la determinación original del sentido de ser.” PA, 76. 10. PA, 36–37. 11. I take this last point directly from Enrique Dussel’s Philosophy of Liberation. 12. PA, 56. 13. The limits of Mayz Vallenilla’s analysis become evident in the discussion of the coloniality of knowledge and the coloniality of time in chapter 5. 14. Augusto Salazar Bondy, “The Meaning and Problem of Hispanic American Philosophic Thought,” Latin American Philosophy for the Twenty-First Century, ed. Jorge E. Gracia and Elizabeth Millán-Zaibert (New York: Prometheus Books, 2004); ¿Existe una filosofía de nuestra América? (Mexico: Siglo XXI, 1988). First published by Siglo XXI in 1968. An abridged version was published as Sentido y problema del pensamiento filosófico hispanoamericano, with an English translation in 1969 (Lawrence, KS: Center of Latin American Studies, 1969). This was a lecture given by Salazar Bondy at the University of Kansas. Hereafter I refer to the essay as it appears in Latin American Philosophy for the Twenty-First Century as “M & P.” 15. Leopoldo Zea’s Latin American Philosophy as Philosophy and Nothing More is a response to Bondy’s thesis. For a careful discussion of this controversy one may refer to the fine work of Mario Sáenz: “Zea’s Conception of the Assumptive Project and Liberation,” The Identity of Liberation in Latin American Thought: Latin American Thought and the Phenomenology of Leopoldo Zea (New York: Lexington Books, 1999), 251–303. 16. Mario Sáenz, The Identity of Liberation in Latin American Thought: Latin American Thought and the Phenomenology of Leopoldo Zea (New York: Lexington Books, 1999), 251–253. 17. Ibid., 253. 18. M & P, 390. 19. M & P, 390. 20. M & P, 391. 21. M & P, 391–392. 22. “Philosophy . . . in an integral culture is the highest form of consciousness.” M & P, 395.

Notes to Pages 43–49 | 231 23. M & P, 395–396. 24. M & P, 395. 25. M & P, 395–396. 26. M & P, 396. 27. In his essay “La filosofía actual en América Latina,” Zea even points to Frantz Fanon as a philosophical figure who opens the question of philosophy in terms of the colonized. Leopoldo Zea, “La filosofía actual en América Latina,” in La filosofía actual en América Latina (Mexico: Grijalbo, 1976), 209. 28. M & P, 396. 29. M & P, 397. 30. As many of you know, although they transcend their topic, most of Salazar Bondy’s works deal concretely with education in Peru. 31. M & P, 381. I should also add that this view follows a myth that will remain in play to date, the idea that there are no longer living indigenous cultures that may contribute to modernity and beyond in Latin America. This myth has been undone by the arising of the indigenous movements that today compose a new horizon for socio-political thought in Latin America, from the Zapatista movement to the indigenous movements in Bolivia, all of which continue traditions that predate the arrival of the conquistadors and show a dramatic ability to withstand and absorb change. 32. FASM, 48. “Idonism” refers to the realist school of Ferdinand Gonseth, occupies itself with research on the adequation of mathematics to reality, and thereby seeks the fundamental conditions for the development of a valid and efficient science. 33. FASM, 48–49. 34. M & P, 391–392. 35. Salazar Bondy, Contra la dominación (Lima, Peru: Siglo XXI Ediciones, 1984); Dominación y liberación (Escritos 1966–1974), ed. Helen Orvig and David Sobrevilla (Lima, Peru: Facultad de Letras y Ciencias Humanas, Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos, 1994). In it note “Filosofía de la dominación y filosofía de la liberación,” the transcript of Salazar Bondy’s lecture in 1973 at the Simposio de filosofía latinoamericana, cuartas jornadas académicas, of the Facultad de Filosofía y Teología de la Universidad del Salvador (San Miguel, Argentina). His secondary school projects include Breve vocabulario filosófico (Lima, Peru: Editorial Universo, 1967) and Breve antología filosófica (Lima, Peru: Editorial Universo, 1967). 36. Augusto Salazar Bondy, Entre Escilas y Caribdis, 3rd ed. (Lima, Peru: Ediciones Rikchai, 1985), 70. Hereafter cited as “EC.” 37. Ibid. 38. EC, 61–62. 39. For an in-depth treatment of Salazar Bondy and his analytical thought, see Javier Sasso, La etica filosófica en América Latina: tres modelos contemporáneos (Caracas, Venezuela: Ediciones Celarg, 1987), 13–66. 40. EC, 31. 41. The inseparable character of concrete phenomena and analytical thought already appears in Salazar Bondy’s dissertation in 1953, published in 1958 under the title Irrealidad e idealidad (Irreality and Ideality). Augusto Salazar Bondy, Irrealidad e idealidad (Lima, Peru: Universidad Mayor de San Marco, 1958). In his conclusion Salazar Bondy

232 | Notes to Pages 49–52 points to three distinct ways of engaging the issue: the phenomenological, the question of valuation that accompanies all judgments of the phenomena, and the question of the temporality of consciousness, concerning historicity and human life (141–143). Salazar Bondy points to the interrelation and necessary duplicity of thought again in 1958 in La epistemología de Gaston Bachelard (The Epistemology of Gaston Bachelard) (Lima, Peru: Universidad Mayor de San Marco, 1958). “In any case, we know by virtue of it [Bachelard’s epistemology] that we cannot seriously take up the question of ontology, without passing somehow through the questions of epistemology, in which also being is in question. Nor may the importance of the anthropological in this theory of science be passed over. If there is a radical motive in it [Bachelard’s theory], as we have already noted, it is without doubt man, the spirit that operates in science” (ibid., 28). Note that in both cases it is ultimately a response to the concrete situation of human beings that underlies and orients the need for thinking phenomenologically, ontologically, and analytically. 42. EC, 76. 43. EC, 76. 44. EC, 76. 45. EC, 77. 46. EC, 77. 47. I find this a fine example of how analytical thought, history, and social-political and economic consciousness coexist in Latin American thought without the seeming requirement of establishing the primacy of one aspect of thought and experience over another. The continuous battle for high ground and division of fields between analytical philosophy, continental philosophy, phenomenology, feminism, gender studies, etc. appears here only as the best ally of the powers already operative in the contemporary systems of power and knowledge. To separate is to conquer? But in order to begin to see this, one must step back from the economy of struggle and conquering that by limiting their openings identifies and delimits the various camps.

3. Latin American Philosophy and Liberation 1. Leopoldo Zea, La filosofía americana como filosofía sin más (Mexico: Siglo XXI Editores, 2010), 74–76. From here on indicated as “FASM.” All English texts are my translation. 2. El pensamiento filosófico latinoamericano, del Caribe y “latino” (1300–2000), ed. Enrique Dussel, Eduardo Mendieta, and Carmen Bohórquez (DF, Mexico: Siglo XXI Editores, 2009), 400. 3. Relevant to the development of the philosophy of liberation are the following texts, in which first appear the ideas of the founding members of the philosophical movement: Revista de filosofía latinoamericana: liberación y cultura, Tomo 1, enero–junio, 1975, n. 1 (Buenos Aires: Ediciones Castañeda). Revista de filosofía latinoamericana: liberación y cultura, Tomo 1, julio–diciembre, 1975, n. 2 (Buenos Aires: Ediciones Castañeda). Fernando García Cambeiro, ed., Cultura popular y filosofía de la liberación, Vol. 15 (Buenos Aires: Colección Estudios Latinoamericanos, 1975). As García Cambeiro indicates, this volume follows Hacia una filosofía de la liberación

Notes to Pages 52–54 | 233 latinoamericana, in that the questions of the concept of “pueblo and its expression” becomes the central issue for the concretization of the theoretical frames offered already in 1973 (ibid., “A manera de presentación,” i). Hacia una filosofía de la liberación latinoamericana, Enfoques Latinoamericanos n. 2. (Buenos Aires: Bonum, 1973). 4. El pensamiento filosófico latinoamericano, del Caribe y “latino” (1300–2000), ed. Enrique Dussel, Eduardo Mendieta, and Carmen Bohórquez (DF, Mexico: Siglo XXI Editores, 2009), 400–401. 5. Revista de filosofía latinoamericana: liberación y cultura, Tomo 1, julio–diciembre, 1975, n. 2 (Buenos Aires, Argentina: Ediciones Castañeda), 175–181. 6. Horacio Cerutti Guldberg, Filosofía de la liberación latinoamericana, 3rd ed. (México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2006). From here on cited as “FLL.” See also Ofelia Schutte, Cultural Identity and Social Liberation in Latin American Thought (Albany: SUNY Press, 1993), 175–181. 7. On the development of Dussel’s philosophy of liberation, see the fine work by a disciple of Dussel: Pedro Enrique Garcia Ruiz, Filosofía de la liberación: una aproximación al pensamiento de Enrique Dussel (DF, Mexico: Editorial Dríada, 2003). 8. An earlier version of this argument was presented with Enrique Dussel at the meeting of the Radical Philosophical Association at the University of Oregon: “Life at the Limit: The Politics of Liberation and the Need for an Aesthetics of Liberation,” Radical Philosophy Association, University of Oregon, November 12, 2010. 9. First of all, as Simón Bolívar indicates, the sense of Latin America may come only from the articulate engagement with its political, social, economic, and geographical circumstances. Moreover, as Leopoldo Zea shows, this also means understanding the historical and geopolitical structures and developments that situate Latin America in the world. But these observations remain only superficial if we seek to develop a Latin American thought. The elements I just mentioned may easily be understood in terms of the disciplines and values to which they are traditionally ascribed—and also in terms of the interpretation of Latin America and humanity in general—as the comportment and production of rational entities or animals that appear within the horizon of the world and which, like any other data, are to be defined, studied, and manipulated by human sciences and the economic structures of power that sustain such a conception of human life. We are not speaking of the interpretation of a situation that is readily available, as is the case when science interprets human experience and speaks of “human beings” or when humanity is seen in terms of the set of cultural artifacts that are said to define human beings’ highest values: for example music, works of art, literature, law, and the sciences. In order to engage our situation and its various configurations we must dig deeper, closer to how and where we are. 10. Enrique Dussel, Philosophy of Liberation, trans. Aquilina Martinez and Christine Morkovsky (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 1985), available online from Servicio CLACSO, Consejo Latinoamericano de Ciencias Sociales, 1996/2002. From here on I refer to the work as “PL,” first indicating the English translation’s page number and then the Spanish version’s page number. PL, 10; 21. 11. PL, 15; 27.

234 | Notes to Pages 54–58 12. “Philosophy of liberation tries to formulate a metaphysics (2.4.9.2)—not an ontology (2.4.9.1). . . . To do this it is necessary to deprive being of its alleged eternal and divine foundation.” PL, 15; 27. 13. Much of Salazar Bondy’s later work deals concretely with education in Peru. 14. Enrique Dussel, Filosofía de la cultura y la liberación (DF, México: Universidad Autónoma de México, 2006), 27. 15. Enrique Dussel, Lecciones de introducción a la filosofía, de antropología filosófica (Mendoza, 1968). Unpublished but available on Enrique Dussel’s website at enriquedussel. com/libros.html. Hereafter cited as “LI.” 16. As Pedro Enrique García Ruiz shows, it is through understanding Dussel’s reading of Heidegger, both of Being and Time and of the German philosopher’s later work, that one can see the grounds for Dussel’s work Para una de-strucción de la historia de la ética (Mendoza, Argentina: Editorial Ser y Tiempo, Facultad de Filosofía y Letras, Universidad de Cuyo, 1972). Pedro Enrique García Ruiz, Filosofía de la liberación: Una aproximación al pensamiento de Enrique Dussel (DF, Mexico: Editorial Dríada, 2003), 93–111. 17. LI, 76. This may be compared with how Dussel distinguishes (in chapter 2 of his Philosophy of Liberation) between the recognition of the difference between objects (proxemic) and that of another human being (proximity). (Enrique Dussel, “From Phenomenology to Liberation,” in Philosophy of Liberation, trans. Aquilina Martinez and Christine Morkovsky (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 1985), sections 2.1.1.1, 2.1.1.2, 2.1.2.1. Enrique Dussel, “De la fenomenología a la liberación,” in Filosofía de la liberación (Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2011), same section numbers. It should be noted that in this chapter—in which Dussel associates phenomenology with the Westernizing system of Being—Dussel makes a differentiation between epiphany and phenomenology. The interpretation of phenomenology becomes clear below, in our discussion of his transition from Heidegger to Levinas. However, Levinas himself follows a radical phenomenological insight in introducing the other as critique of totality. Therefore, throughout my interpretation I sustain that in this latter sense Dussel’s philosophy is grounded on a radical phenomenological insight. 18. LI, 77. 19. LI, II. Historia antropo-logica, 75–80. 20. LI, 78. 21. Paul Ricoeur, Histoire et vérité (Paris: Points, Seuil, 2002). 22. Enrique Dussel, Filosofia de la cultura y la liberación (DF, México: Universidad Autónoma de México, 2006), 11. 23. LI, 70. 24. LI, 70. 25. For Dussel another major influence from Paul Ricoeur is his Histoire et vérité. Dussel identifies an earlier version of this essay as a crucial reading that marks his thinking up to the late sixties (titled “Civilisation universelle et cultures nationales,” published in Esprit) (Filosofía de la cultura y de la liberación, 11) Dussel finds in Ricoeur’s essay the insight that all civilization precludes a cultural life that projects and manipulates the objects of civilization. In other words, meaning comes from living praxis and the values and symbols that arise in a particular group. Dussel writes concerning Latin America: “A

Notes to Pages 58–63 | 235 people that comes to think itself, that reaches self-consciousness, the comprehension of its cultural structures, of its ultimate projects, in the cultivation and evolution of its traditions, has its identity with itself” (76). This means that to think our being-there in its historical authenticity will require engaging the cultural (and religious) structures out of the praxis of the particular culture. 26. “Anti-Cartesian Meditations and Transmodernity: From the Perspective of Philosophy of Liberation,” ed. Alejandro Vallega and Ramón Grosfoguel (unpublished manuscript). Hereafter cited as “A-M.” 27. Ibid. 28. Ibid. 29. A-M. 30. America Latina: dependencia y liberación (Buenos Aires: Fernando García, 1973), 67–132. 31. Towards an Ethics of Latin American Liberation (Consejo Latinoamericano de Ciencias Sociales, 1996–2002). Hereafter cited as “TE.” 32. TE, introduction, 13. 33. Filosofia de la cultura y de la liberación (Universidad Autónoma de la Ciudad de Mexico, 2006), 27. Also see Liberación latinoamericana y Emmanuel Levinas (Buenos Aires: Bonum, 1975). 34. “Sensibility and Otherness in Emmanuel Levinas,” Philosophy Today, Vol. 43, No. 2, Summer 1999, 126–134. 35. Enrique Dussel, Philosophy of Liberation, trans. Aquilina Martinez and Christine Morkovsky (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 1985). Available online from Servicio CLACSO, Consejo Latinoamericano de Ciencias Sociales, 1996/2002. From here on I refer to the work as “PL,” first indicating the English translation’s page number and then the Spanish page number. PL, 10; 21. 36. “El método analéctico” (“The Analectic Method”), in Método para una filosofía de la liberación, 2nd ed. (Salamanca, Spain: Sígueme, 1974), 181–183. 37. PL, 170; 198. 38. PL, 173; 200. 39. Near the end of the book Dussel states that the praxis of philosophy of liberation occurs with a proto-philosophical discourse which moves as the political introduces the ethical and the latter philosophy. PL, 173; 200. 40. PL, 3; 15. 41. PL, 3–4; 15–16. 42. PL, 170; 197. 43. A-M. This chapter was originally presented as a paper in the XXII World Congress of Philosophy (Seoul, Korea, August 2, 2008), in the Third Plenary Session on “Rethinking History of Philosophy and Comparative Philosophy.” 44. Ibid. 45. On the Dussel-Wallerstein dialogue, see for example Dussel’s “World-System and Transmodernity,” in Nepantla: Views from the South, Vol. 3, No. 2, 2002, 221–244. Also see Dussel’s “Debate on the Geoculture of the World-System” in The World We Are Entering 2000–2050, ed. I. Wallerstein and A. Clesse (Amsterdam: Dutch University Press, 2002), 239–246.

236 | Notes to Pages 63–66 46. Enrique Dussel, Filosofía de la cultura y la liberación (DF, México: Universidad Autónoma de México, 2006), 29. 47. See Walter Mignolo, “The Geopolitics of Knowledge and the Colonial Difference,” The South Atlantic Quarterly, Vol. 101, No. 1, Winter 2002. 48. Ibid., 62–63. 49. As Mignolo explains in his article (ibid., 65 and 90), and as we will see in chapter 5, this is something shared by Dussel’s and Aníbal Quijano’s work. 50. PL, 106; 169. See the development of the various aspects in PL, chapter 4, “From Nature to Economics,” 106–152; 169–232. 51. Política de la liberación II: arquitectónica (Madrid: Trotta, 2009), 440. 52. PL, 16; 44. 53. The question of rationality and philosophy will become a central issue in the next chapter. 54. Enrique Dussel, La producción teorética de Marx. Un comentario a los Grundrisse (México: Siglo XXI, 1985). 55. Enrique Dussel, Hacia un Marx desconocido. Un comentario a los Manuscritos del 61–63 (México: Siglo XXI UAM-I, 1988). 56. Enrique Dussel, El último Marx (1863–1882) (México: Siglo XXI UAM-I, 1990). 57. Enrique Dussel, Las metáforas teológicas de Marx (Caracas: El Perro y la Rana, 2007). Several essays have also been published in English: “Marx’s Economic Manuscripts of 1861–63 and the ‘Concept’ of Dependency,” Latin American Perspectives, Vol. 17, Iss. 2, Post-Marxism, the Left, and Democracy, 62–101. “Four Drafts of Capital,” Rethinking Marxism, Vol. 13, No. 1, Spring 2001. “Marx, Schelling, and Surplus Value,” International Studies in Philosophy, Vol. 38, No. 4, 2006. “The Definitive Discovery of the Category of Surplus Value,” in Politics of Liberation (2007). 58. Política de la liberación. Historia mundial y crítica (Politics of Liberation: World History and Critique) (Madrid: Trotta, 2007), 221. 59. Ethics of Liberation: In the Age of Globalization and Exclusion, ed. Alejandro A Vallega, trans. Eduardo Mendieta, Camilo Pérez Bustillo, Yolanda Angulo, and Nelson Maldonado-Torres (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012). Originally in Spanish: Ética de la liberación en la edad de la globalización y de la exclusion (Madrid: Trotta, 1998). Henceforth cited as “EL.” 60. The Politics is divided into three volumes. The first volume is titled Politics of Liberation: A Critical World History (trans. Cooper, SCM Press, 2010). It was originally published as Política de la liberación: historia mundial y crítica (Madrid: Trotta, 2007). Volume 2 is titled Política de la liberación: arquitectónica (Madrid: Trotta, 2009). Volume 3 has not been published. 61. EL, 140. 62. The work is introduced by a detailed discussion of the will to live in Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Heidegger. PLA, 46–65. 63. Enrique Dussel, “Carta a los indignados,” Carta a los indignados (Mexico: La Jornada Ediciones/Demos, 2011), 18–20. 64. Enrique Dussel, Politics of Liberation: A Critical World History, trans. Cooper (Norwich, UK: SCM Press, 2010). Originally published as Política de la liberación: historia mundial y crítica. (Madrid: Trotta, 2007).

Notes to Pages 66–71 | 237 65. Enrique Dussel, Política de la liberación: arquitectónica (Madrid: Trotta, 2009). Henceforth cited as “PLA.” 66. PLA, 470. 67. PLA, 58. 68. One finds clear examples of this modern political theory in Hobbes as well as Machiavelli. 69. “De la potentia a la potestas: ¿un concepto ontológico positive de poder?” PLA, 59–65. 70. “Al poder político segundo, como mediación, institucionalizado, por medios de representantes, le llamaremos la potestas.” PLA, 61. 71. We are speaking of the development of the kind of ideological hegemony developed by Gramsci in his political philosophy. 72. PLA, 46–65. 73. “La vida es la condición absoluta, pero aún más; es el contenido de la política; y es por ello igualmente su objetivo último, cotidiano, el de sus fines, estrategias, tácticas, medios, estructuras, instituciones.” PLA, 439. 74. “Producir, reproducir y desarrollar la vida humana en comunidad, públicamente, en última instancia de toda la humanidad, en el largo plazo. Es decir, teniendo a la misma vida humana como criterio.” PLA, 439. 75. Dussel explains the sense of production, reproduction, and development of life in Tesis 11 of his Ética de Liberación. See Enrique Dussel, Filosofía de la liberación en la edad de la globalización y de la exclusion, 5th ed. (Madrid: Editorial Trotta, 2005), 622. 76. PLA, 51. 77. PLA, 51. 78. Ibid. 79. PL, 16; 29. 80. PL, 17; 29–30. 81. PL, 17; 30. 82. PL, 19; 33. 83. See “‘Sensibility’ and ‘Otherness’ in Emmanuel Levinas,” Philosophy Today, Vol. 43, No. 2, 1999, 126–134. 84. PL, 17; 30. 85. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (New York: Grove University Press, 1967), 9. 86. Ibid., 111. 87. Life in the mines was documented by Alfredo Jaar in It is Difficult, Vol.1 (Mantua, Italy: Maurizio Corraini, 2008). The images were part of two original series: Introduction to a Distant World, 1985, and Out of Balance, 1989). The miners’ situation was also described by Sebastião Salgado: “Deep in Brazil’s Amazon jungle, thousands of dust-covered laborers swarm over a mountain of red earth, using their pickaxes and shovels to carve its surface into a bizarre landscape. It is a scene that could belong to an outlandish biblical epic movie or a sinister labor camp. It is neither. Serra Pelada (Bald Mountain), 270 miles south of the mouth of the Amazon River, is the site of one of the biggest gold rushes in modern Brazilian history” (“Brazil: The Treasure of Serra Pelada,” Time Magazine, September 8, 1980).

238 | Notes to Pages 71–80 88. Here, taking pause from Dussel’s project and echoing Blanchot and Nancy, one would require a differentiation of the idea of work behind the idea of a living desire for life that occurs as “production” and “augmentation” of life. 89. To cite one powerful example, one may consider the dynamic and transformative elements in the masks used by the Guaraní people of Paraguay in their rituals. See Ticio Escobar, El mito del arte y el mito del pueblo (Santiago, Chile: Editorial Metales Pesados, 2008). 90. As a result, the philosophy of liberation itself remains always in danger of being reduced to a crude pragmatism, to facts and what they require, since aesthetic experience and its transformative radicalness seem divorced from political effectiveness.

4. Delimitations . . . of Dussel’s Philosophy of Liberation and Beyond The source of the epigraph at the head of the chapter is “Entrevista a Enrique Dussel,” Revista Per Se, April 14, 2009. 1. Ofelia Schutte, Cultural Identity and Social Liberation in Latin American Thought (Albany: SUNY Press, 1993). From here on cited as “CI.” 2. Horacio Cerutti Guldberg, Filosofía de la liberación latinoamericana, 3rd ed. (México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2006). From here on cited as “FLL.” 3. Enrique Dussel, “The Analectical Moment,” in Philosophy of Liberation, trans. Aquilina Martinez and Christine Markovsky (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 1985), 158–160; 169–170. Filosofía de la liberación (México: Fondo Cultural de Economía, 2011), 238–241; 253. 4. As should be clear from the last chapter, I agree completely with the reading of Dussel’s work that shows his relocation of philosophy in the locus of enunciation, as Walter Mignolo has shown. See Walter Mignolo, “The Geopolitics of Knowledge and the Colonial Difference,” The South Atlantic Quarterly, Vol. 101, No. 1, Winter 2002. 5. See Raúl Fornet-Betancourt, Mujer y filosofía en el pensamiento iberoamericano: momentos de una relación difícil (Barcelona: Editorial Anthropos, 2009), 137–142. 6. CI, 179. 7. Cf. Schutte’s interpretation of the use of “distinto” as a rejection of difference and thereby of alterity in its concrete and lived senses. CI, 204–205. 8. “According to this model, ethical relations are not conceived in terms of a person’s decisions to undertake certain responsibilities in the context of various specific circumstances, but only as responses (of service) to the analectically determined needs of an alteratively positioned other.” CI, 205. 9. CI, 189. 10. FLL, 436. 11. Recognizing this tendency, the author seeks to go beyond the populist salvationist tendencies by deepening the analysis of the ways populism works. FLL, 511. 12. FLL, 52. 13. FLL, 437 and 443–455. 14. FLL, 455. 15. Cerutti Guldberg develops this criticism in other directions in the first chapter of his book, in the sections titled “The Erupting of a New Philosophical Generation?” and “Characterization of the Ethicist Self-Image in the Philosophy of Liberation.” FLL, 59–76 and 77–78.

Notes to Pages 80–86 | 239 16. See Dussel’s works on Marx through the eighties: The Theoretical Production of Marx (1985, on the Grundrisse); The Last Marx (1988, on the writings of 1863–1882); Towards a New Marx (1990, on the 1861–1863 manuscripts). These works culminate in Marx’s Theological Metaphors (1994). Several essays have also been published in English: “Marx’s Economic Manuscripts of 1861–63 and the ‘Concept’ of Dependency,” Latin American Perspectives Vol. 17, Issue 2, Post-Marxism, the Left, and Democracy, 62–101. “Four Drafts of Capital,” Rethinking Marxism, Vol. 13, No. 1, Spring 2001. “Marx, Schelling, and Surplus Value,” International Studies in Philosophy, Vol. 38, No. 4, 2006. 17. Enrique Dussel, “Leopoldo Zea’s Project of a Philosophy of Latin American History,” in Amaryll Chanady, Latin American Identity and Constructions of Difference (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 26–42. Hereafter cited as “LZ.” 18. LZ, 33. 19. LZ, 33. 20. LZ, 34. 21. LZ, 35. 22. LZ, 35. 23. LZ, 35. 24. LZ, 35–36. 25. LZ, 36. 26. LZ, 36. 27. LZ, 36. 28. LZ, 36. 29. LZ, 36. 30. LZ, 36–37. 31. LZ, 36. 32. El pensamiento filosófico latinoamericano, del Caribe y “latino” (1300–2000), ed. Enrique Dussel, Eduardo Mendieta, and Carmen Bohórquez (DF, Mexico: Siglo XXI Editores, 2009). 33. Gloria Anzaldúa, “Preface to the First Edition,” in Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, 3rd ed. (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 2007), 13. 34. On this issue of hearing and listening see James Risser’s The Life of Understanding: A Contemporary Hermeneutics (Albany: SUNY Press, 2012). In this work Risser departs from traditional hermeneutics to give emphasis to listening and an opening that is not determined by the need for speaking the language of the other without a sense of loss. 35. Ética de la liberación en la edad de la globalización y de la exclusión (Madrid: Trotta, 1998.) Ethics of Liberation: In the Age of Globalization and Exclusion, ed. Alejandro A. Vallega, trans. Eduardo Mendieta, Camilo Pérez Bustillo, Yolanda Angulo, and Nelson Maldonado-Torres (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012). The two volumes of the politics that are already in print are Política de la liberación I: Historia mundial y crítica (Madrid: Trotta, 2007) and Política de la liberación II, arquitectónica (Madrid: Trotta, 2009). 36. See Enrique Dussel, The Underside of Modernity: Apel, Ricoeur, Rorty, Taylor, and the Philosophy of Liberation, ed. and trans. Eduardo Mendieta (New York: Humanities Press, 1996); Enrique Dussel, Thinking from the Underside of History, ed. Linda Alcoff and Eduardo Mendieta (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000); Enrique Dussel, Apel,

240 | Notes to Pages 86–93 Ricoeur, Rorty y la filosofía de la liberación (México: Universidad de Guadalajara, 1973); Enrique Dussel, La ética de la liberación ante el debate de Apel, Taylor y Vattimo con respuesta crítica de K.-O. Apel (México: Universidad Autónoma del Estado de México, 1998); and Enrique Dussel and Apel Karl-Otto, Ética del discurso ética de la liberación (Madrid: Trotta, 2005). Eduardo Mendieta offers a fine treatment of the dialogues and a general introduction to Dussel in “Politics in an Age of Planetarization: Enrique Dussel’s Critique of Political Reason,” in Global Fragments (Albany: SUNY Press, 2007), 125–140. 37. “To be a Latin American was until very recently a great misfortune, because this did not allow us to be European. Today it is just the opposite: the inability to become European, in spite of our great efforts, allows us to have a personality; it allows us to learn, in this moment of crisis in European culture, that there is something of our own [algo que nos es propio] that can give us support. What this something is should be one of the issues that a Latin American philosophy must investigate.” Leopoldo Zea, “En torno a la filosofia americana,” Cuadernos Americanos Vol. 3, 1942, 63–78, henceforth cited as “CLAP” (my translation unless otherwise noted). 38. Política de la liberación II, arquitectónica (Madrid: Trotta, 2009), 440. 39. See Mendieta’s discussion in “Politics in an Age of Planetarization: Enrique Dussel’s Critique of Political Reason,” in Global Fragments (Albany: SUNY Press, 2007), 125–140. 40. See, for example, Franz Hinkelammert, Hacia la crítica de la razón mítica: El laberinto de la modernidad (Bogotá: Ediciones Desde Abajo, 2009). 41. LZ, 33. 42. This was originally a lecture presented at the XXII World Congress of Philosophy (Seoul, Korea) in August 2, 2008. The current text has the title “A New Age in the History of Philosophy: The World Dialogue between Philosophical Traditions” and is chapter 7 of Enrique Dussel, “Anti-Cartesian Meditations and Transmodernity: From the Perspective of Philosophy of Liberation,” ed. Alejandro Vallega and Ramón Grosfoguel, (unpublished manuscript). From here on the text will be cited as “A-M.” 43. A-M. 44. A-M. 45. A-M. 46. A-M. 47. A-M. 48. A-M. 49. A-M. 50. A-M. See Paul Ricoeur, La symbolique du mal (Paris: Aubier, 1963). 51. A-M. 52. A-M. 53. A-M. 54. A-M. 55. A-M, chapter 2, “Anti-Cartesian Meditations: On the Origin of the Philosophical Anti-Discourse of Modernity.” 56. A-M, chapter 6, “The ‘Philosophy of Liberation,’ The Post-Modern Debate, and Latin American Studies.” 57. Ibid.

Notes to Pages 93–105 | 241 58. A-M, chapter 6, “The ‘Philosophy of Liberation,’ The Post-Modern Debate, and Latin American Studies.” 59. This is not the place to engage another criticism offered of Dussel’s work, namely his turn to a theological foundation for the development of a political system. This does seem to be one aspect of Dussel’s later thought. 60. César Vallejo, “El buen sentido,” Obra poética completa, ed. Enrique Ballon Aguirre (Venezuela: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1979), 109. 61. Ibid., 110. 62. Ibid., 110.

5. Beyond the Domination of the “Coloniality of Power and Knowledge” 1. Although the issues of Eurocentrism and colonialism are central to this discussion, the point is to recognize issues within Latin American thought. 2. Eloise Quiñones Keber, ed., Codex Telleriano-Remensis (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995). 3. I am grateful to Charles Scott and Omar Rivera for our exchanges concerning issues of temporality and liberation and for the great insight I have gained from their work. See Omar Rivera, “From Revolving Time to the Time of Revolution: Mariátegui’s Encounter with Nietzsche,” APA Newsletter, Vol. 8, No. 9, Fall 2008. 4. Aníbal Quijano, “Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Social Classification,” in Coloniality at Large: Latin America and the Postcolonial Debate, ed. Mabel Moraña, Enrique Dussel, and Carlos A. Jáuregui (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 181. In Spanish: “Colonialidad del poder, eurocentrismo y América Latina,” in La colonialidad del saber, eurocentrismo y ciencias sociales, ed. Edgardo Lander (Buenos Aires: Consejo Americano de Ciencias Sociales, 2000), 201–246. I will refer to the English article as “CP.” For further reading on the concept of the coloniality of power and knowledge, see Quijano, “Colonialidad y modernidad/racionalidad,” Perú Indígena, Vol. 13, No. 29, 1992. 5. “a supposedly different biological structure that placed some in a natural situation of inferiority to the others.” CP, 182. 6. CP, 189. 7. Ibid. 8. Enrique Dussel, Philosophy of Liberation, trans. Aquilina Martinez and Christine Morkovsky (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 1985), 3; 8. 9. CP, 189. 10. CP, 190. See also Walter Mignolo, The Darker Side of the Renaissance (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 2003) and The Idea of Latin America (London: Blackwell, 2005). 11. CP, 190. 12. This change of temporality that underlies all understanding of being is clearly and perhaps most dramatically articulated by Cervantes in the first modern novel, Don Quijóte. See Aníbal Quijano, “Of Don Quixote and Windmills in Latin America,” Estudios Avanzados Vol. 21, No. 55, 2007. 13. In terms of the imposition of a single order and its conceptual structures one may think of Kant’s aesthetics in the Critique of Judgment. Kant affirms that aesthetic judgment ultimately is an affirmation of life, an experience of the universal that grounds cog-

242 | Notes to Pages 106–108 nitive knowledge (conceptual knowledge). This occurs as aesthetic judgment is a reflexive judgment not determined by the rules of cognition (conceptual knowledge). It is the correlation between imagination and understanding that is the feeling of the beautiful, where imagination is free from cognition or the rules of reason. But the question is: must aesthetic experience be understood in relation to rational cognition in all cases? Is the question of the rational mind with its conceptual categories in relation to aesthetic judgment, feeling, and taste not a very specific question of the modern Western mind? Does the experience of self-knowledge of a Guarani dancer wearing his traditional mask in a ritual even involve the issue of the relation of rational knowledge or cognition (understood in those terms) to aesthetic judgment? In such an experience as the latter, Kant’s insights seem forced, as they insist on putting the mask and the ritual in relation to the rational cognition behind scientific knowledge. I should add that this does not mean that Kant’s insights are not of great importance for understanding many issues in aesthetic experience but there is a limit that does not belong to that thought. 14. Aníbal Quijano, “Modernity, Identity and Utopia in Latin America,” Boundary Vol. 20, No. 3, 1993. Reprinted in Aníbal Quijano, The Postmodern Debate in Latin America (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995). Original version in Spanish: Modernidad, identidad y utopia en América Latina (Quito, Eucador: Editorial El Conejo, 1990). The numeration and reference will be from the original English version of the article, hereafter referred to as “MIU.” MIU, 140–144. 15. At this point it would be too general to claim a simple linear temporality in the movement of Spirit, since the labor of Spirit happens at different levels in simultaneous moments or stages. However, this simultaneity remains oriented by the time/consciousness of the coloniality of power and knowledge and its temporality. In other words, stages may appear to be simultaneous, but they mark specific points in an evolution defined by the progress of rationalism. Stages are assigned places according to the advancements of Western modern European reason and its limits. 16. Along the lines of diverse thinkers such as, for example, Jacques Rancier and Slaboj Zizek. 17. I have written on this elsewhere, calling it “the coloniality of thought,” with respect to the various expectations and requirements that underlie what may be understood as philosophical knowledge. 18. I believe this is the limit that Giorgio Agamben has found and underlined in his work with respect to life under the coloniality of power and knowledge, when he speaks of life as a naked life under the operation of the sovereign exception. 19. An earlier version of this short section appears in “Out of Latin American Thought from Radical Exteriority: Philosophy after the Age of Pernicious Knowledge,” The Gift of Logos: Essays in Continental Philosophy, ed. D. Jones, J. Wirth, and M. Schwartz (Newcastle upon Tyne, U.K.: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010). 20. One may also rephrase the question in a simpler way: What is the direct relationship between colonialism and modern philosophy? 21. Aníbal Quijano, “Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Social Classification,” in Coloniality at Large: Latin America and the Postcolonial Debate, ed. Mabel Moraña, Enrique Dussel, and Carlos A. Jáuregui (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 195.

Notes to Pages 108–114 | 243 22. Here we find an indication of the interior relationship between the ego conquiro and the ego cogito. See note 13. 23. “Before the ego cogito there is an ego conquiro.” (Enrique Dussel, Philosophy of Liberation, trans. Aquilina Martinez and Christine Morkovsky (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 1985), 3. Thus, Enrique Dussel points to these dispositions when he points out the relationship between the ego conquiro that takes full force in the colonization of the Americas and the modern Cartesian identification of the human as ego cogito. Nelson Maldonado-Torres, in his work on the coloniality of being and in his book Against War, develops the sense of being that results from these dispositions, particularly with regard to the warring attitude that sustains the conceptuality of the Western modern tradition. (Nelson Maldonado-Torres, Against War: Views from the Underside of Modernity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008). 24. MIU, 201–216. 25. MIU, 142. 26. MIU, 142. 27. MIU, 141. 28. MIU, 141. 29. MIU, 142–143. 30. MIU, 143. 31. MIU, 144–145. 32. MIU, 145. 33. “The victory of instrumental reasoning was even more profound and tragic because it also involved ideas and social movements that emerged as the bearers of the original liberatory promises of modernity, only to succumb themselves to the force of instrumental reason. What is worse, these ideas and movements attempted, not without success for a long time, to present instrumental reasoning as nothing less than liberating reasoning itself. In this way they contributed to the occlusion of the association between reason and liberation. Everyone knows what I am referring to: Socialism did not manage to be anything other than ‘actually existing socialism’—that is, Stalinism in any of its local variants.” MIU, 146. 34. MIU, 149. 35. In my view the writings and thought of José Carlos Mariátegui constitute another place from which to begin to think in radical exteriority, a space of thought that remains to be developed and that would require book-length treatment. The Peruvian philosopher Omar Rivera has begun such work (see note 3). 36. MIU, 149. 37. MIU, 151. 38. MIU, 152. 39. MIU, 154. This idea of a multiple utopia comes from Alberto Flores Galindo and his writing on the Inca. See Alberto Flores Galindo, In Search of an Inca: Identity and Utopia in the Andes, trans. Charles F. Walker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). 40. MIU, 153. 41. MIU, 154. 42. MIU, 149.

244 | Notes to Pages 114–123 43. MIU, 149–150. 44. MIU, 150. 45. I take this to be the case not only in the south but also in all post- and trans-modern world configurations. 46. In terms of the simultaneity of temporalities one may consider as a corollary the emphasis that thinkers like Bolívar put on the vastness of the unfathomable lands of the south as containing a temporality that transcends even the concept of nature which accompanies the concept of history. In doing so they are ultimately highlighting temporalities that are not even necessarily continuous with the projects of human development and that at the same time are crucial in the very possibilities and failures of the developing of communities in the Americas. I am thinking for example of the movement of tectonic plates and geological time as temporalities that are determining of and indifferent to human existence in its distinct articulations and determinations. 47. MIU, 154. 48. MIU, 154. 49. MIU, 150. 50. MIU, 154. 51. MIU, 152. 52. MIU, 152. 53. MIU, 152. 54. Literary tradition, popular oral traditions, and Latin American popular songs are not as separated as one may think. This becomes clear, for instance, in Alejo Carpentier’s writing. See for example Alejo Carpentier, El siglo de las luces (Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 2006); Guerra del tiempo y otros relatos (Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 2001); Concierto barroco (Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 2000); Music in Cuba, trans. Alan West-Durán (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001); and Los pasos perdidos (New York: Penguin Books, 1998).

6. Remaining with the Decolonial Turn 1. Heidegger called this Machenschaft, machination. 2. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin White Masks (New York: Grove Press, 2008), 110. Frantz Fanon, Peau noire masques blancs (Paris: Points, 1971). 3. W. E. B. Du Bois, Writings: The Suppression of the African Slave-Trade / The Souls of Black Folk / Dusk and Dawn / Essays and Articles (New York: Library of America, 1987). 4. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Press, 1979). 5. Fanon’s book is not written against whites or the West. As Fanon himself explains in reference to Nietzsche, his is not a “reactive” book but rather a call for action. In his introduction he writes: “I believe that the fact of the juxtaposition of the white and black races has created a massive psycho-existential complex. I hope by analyzing it to destroy it.” Frantz Fanon, Black Skin White Masks (New York: Grove Press, 2008), 12. Frantz Fanon, Peau noire masques blancs (Paris: Points, 1971), 7–8. 6. Leopoldo Zea, “Negritud e Indigenismo,” in La filosofía como compromiso de liberación (Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1991), 304–305. “En uno y otro caso se trata de mostrar lo humano en el mestizo y el negro” (305). Zea’s idea of mestizaje is central to his develop-

Notes to Pages 123–125 | 245 ment of a Latin American philosophy. Zea’s sense of mestizaje springs from the existential phenomenology and historicism of his teacher José Gaos, the Spanish philosopher and student of José Ortega y Gasset, and from the psychologism and human identity of the Mexican philosopher Samuel Ramos. 7. In Viaje de la América Meridional, Félix de Azara writes, “Mixture improves the races and I think that these mestici have more ingenuity, sagacity and culture than the children of Spanish mothers and fathers.” In Miguel Rojas Mix, Los cien nombres de América (Barcelona: Lumen, 1991), 302. José Vasconcelos, The Cosmic Race /La raza cósmica, trans. Didier T. Jaen (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979). Roberto Fernándes-Retamar puts race at the center of his discussion of Latin American identity in “Caliban” by referring to mestizaje as a particularly Latin American characteristic. (“Caliban,” in Caliban and Other Essays, 2nd ed., trans. Edward Baker [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994], 4.) 8. On the direct effect of African migrations in Latin America, see Dina V. Picotti, La presencia africana en nuestra identidad (Buenos Aires: Ediciones del Sol, 1998). 9. Roberto Fernández Retamar, Caliban (San Juan, Puerto Rico: Ediciones Callejón, 2003), 23 and 62, respectively. José Martí, “Nuestra América,” in Latin American Philosophy for the Twenty-First Century: The Human Condition, Values, and the Search for Identity, ed. Jorge J. E. Gracia and Elizabeth Millán-Zaibert (New York: Prometheus Books, 2004), 251–252. 10. Jean-Paul Sartre, “Orphée noir,” preface to Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1948), xi. 11. As Fanon explains in Black Skin White Masks, “The black man has no ontological resistance in the eyes of the white man.” (Frantz Fanon, Black Skin White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann [New York: Grove Press, 1967], 110.) See Alejandro Vallega, “Unbounded Spirits,” in Sense and Finitude: Encounters at the Limits of Language, Art, and the Political (Albany: SUNY University Press, 2009), 147–154. 12. José Carlos Mariátegui, “El problema del indio,” in Textos básicos, ed. Aníbal Quijano (México City: Fondo de Cultura Económico, 1995), 67. 13. See Anthony Kwame Appiah’s critique of DuBois’s biological and nineteenth-century position about race in “The Uncompleted Argument: Du Bois and the Illusion of Race,” in The Idea of Race, ed. Robert Bernasconi (Indianapolis: Hacket Press, 2000). 14. Miguel Rojas Mix, Los cien nombres de América (Barcelona: Lumen, 1991). 15. Walter Mignolo in The Idea of Latin America goes as far as to show that the biology and color do not become an issue in the concept of race until the nineteenth century. Walter Mignolo, The Idea of Latin America (Singapore: Blackwell, 2007), 17 and 73–74. 16. Aníbal Quijano, “Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Social Classification,” in Coloniality at Large: Latin America and the Postcolonial Debate, ed. Mabel Moraña, Enrique Dussel, and Carlos A. Jáuregui (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 181. Henceforth cited as “CP.” 17. See Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World System: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World Economy in the Sixteenth Century (New York: Academic Press, 1974) and the subsequent volumes II and III. Also see Immanuel Wallerstein, Historical Capitalism with Capitalist Civilization, 2nd ed. (London: Verso, 1996).

246 | Notes to Pages 125–134 18. Walter Mignolo, The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality, & Colonization, 2nd ed. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003). Enrique Dussel, The Invention of the Americas: Eclipse of “the Other” and the Myth of Modernity, trans. Michael D. Barber (New York: Continuum, 1995); “Anti-Cartesian Meditations: On the Origin of the Philosophical Anti-Discourse of Modernity” in “Anti-Cartesian Meditations,” ed. Alejandro Vallega and Ramón Grosfoguel (unpublished manuscript). 19. CP, 187. 20. “In the course of the world expansion of colonial domination on the part of the same dominant race (or, from the eighteenth century onward, ‘Europeans’) the same criteria of social classification were imposed on all of the world population.” CP, 185. 21. CP, 189. 22. Ibid. 23. “Turning the colonized into human beings was not a colonial goal.” María Lugones, “Toward a Decolonial Feminism,” Hypatia, Vol. 25, No. 4, Fall 2010, 744. 24. As Quijano explains: “the Europeans generated a new temporal perspective of history and relocated colonized populations, along with their respective histories and cultures, in the past of a historical trajectory whose culmination was European.” CP, 190. See also Walter Mignolo, The Darker Side of the Renaissance (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 2003) and The Idea of Latin America (Singapore: Blackwell, 2007). 25. We are speaking of the binary differentiation between Eastern and Western, primitive and civilized, magic and mythic-scientific, irrational and rational, traditional and modern sustained by the idea of a single Western historical development. CP, 190. 26. MIU, 150. 27. Enrique Dussel, “A New Age in the History of Philosophy: The World Dialogue between Philosophical Traditions” in “Anti-Cartesian Meditations,” ed. Alejandro Vallega and Ramón Grosfoguel, (unpublished manuscript). 28. In terms of this critical observation in part I owe my gratitude to Ramón Grosfoguel and his candid recollection of the formative years of the theory of coloniality. 29. MIU, 143. 30. The point of using the term “unreason” is to indicate other ways of knowing that, although not rationalist in the modern instrumental sense, are not irrational or nonsensical. 31. Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 256. 32. Jean-François Lyotard, The Differend: Phrases in Dispute (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 9. On Lyotard’s relevance for Latin American thought, see Santiago Castro-Gómez, Crítica de la razón latinoamericana (Barcelona: Puvill Libros, 1996), 42 and 44. 33. Pachamama means the understanding of all that is as the living whole in its fecund manifestations, which includes humans as part of that vital movement. 34. CP, 196–197. 35. CP, 195. 36. CP, 192. 37. Ramón Grosfoguel, “The Epistemic Decolonial Turn: Beyond Political-Economy Paradigms,” Cultural Studies Vol. 21, Nos. 2–3, March–May 2007, pp. 211–223. Hereafter the article will be cited as “EDT.”

Notes to Pages 134–140 | 247 38. Here at issue is Wallerstein’s world-system theory, not Quijano’s analysis of the coloniality of power and knowledge. As I have just indicated, the latter analysis opens a path beyond Wallerstein’s analysis. In placing his emphasis on capital production, Wallerstein fails to engage the coloniality that Quijano exposes in his work. In other words, Wallerstein’s system remains Eurocentric and cannot see the opening accomplished by Quijano. 39. EDT, 216. 40. EDT, 211. Grosfoguel contrasts thinking from and with with thinking about the other, the south, etc. Grosfoguel identifies the latter with the methodology and epistemic delimitation that defines area studies in Western European and North American hegemonic fundamentalist traditions. I should add that in light of Grosfoguel’s analysis and the integration of philosophy into the larger sense of modernity beyond the Western modern rationalist tradition and its history, the issue of fundamentalism becomes a world issue found as much at the center as in the periphery. 41. Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World-System (New York: Academic Press, 1974). 42. Immanuel Wallerstein, The Capitalist World-Economy (Cambridge and Paris: Cambridge University Press and Editions de la Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, 1979). 43. Aníbal Quijano, “Raza, etnia y nación,” in Mariátegui: cuestiones abiertas, ed. Roland Forgues (Lima: Empresa Editora Amauta, 1993); “Coloniality of Power, Ethnocentrism, and Latin America,” Nepantla Vol. 1, No. 3, 2000, pp. 533–580. 44. Gayatri Spivak, In Other Worlds: Essays on Cultural Politics (New York: Rutledge, 1988). Cythis Enloe, Banana, Beaches and Bases: Making Sense of International Politics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990). 45. Walter Mignolo, The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality, and Colonization (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1995); Local Histories/Global Designs: Essays on the Coloniality of Power, Subaltern Knowledges and Border Thinking (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000). Aníbal Quijano, “Colonialidad y Modernidad/Racionalidad,” Perú Indígena Vol. 29, pp. 11–21. 46. Walter Mignolo, Local Histories/Global Designs: Essays on the Coloniality of Power, Subaltern Knowledges and Border Thinking (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000). EDT, 216–217.

7. Yucatán 1. “La reforestación del mundo de la vida: Conversación sobre política, colonialidad y filosofía latinoamericana con Santiago Castro-Gómez,” edited version of the interview given at the colectivo estudiantil PCS (“Pensamiento Crítico del Sur”) at the Universidad Javeriana on January 10, 2012. 2. Santiago Castro-Gómez explains, Ahora bien, en esta constatación casi que profética de la escuela de Frankfurt están también sus limitaciones. Al leer sus textos posteriores a la guerra, da la impresión de que la inmanencia radical que genera el capitalismo desencadenara la completa erosión de las energías rebeldes. Horkheimer y Adorno desconfían por completo de la capacidad de ‘agencia’ política de los sujetos y por eso apelan a instancias que supuestamente escapan a la mercantilización, como por ejemplo la religión y el arte de vanguardia. Es cierto que ya Habermas se había dado

248 | Notes to Pages 140–143 cuenta de las aporías a las que llegó la primera generación de Frankfurt, pero decide optar por un programa filosóficamente metafísico y políticamente socialdemócrata, que proclama la aceptación de las estructuras sociales establecidas. Estructuras que, según Habermas, contienen un potencial emancipatorio que no hay que negar sino “completar.” De ahí su famoso tema de la modernidad como un “proyecto inconcluso.” (“La reforestación del mundo de la vida.”) 3. I must note that here, as throughout this book, life and experience are concepts that are understood as having a normative level but as not being rationally determined. 4. As Santiago Castro-Gómez points out in “La reforestación del mundo de la vida”: Aquí no se trataba de colocar la filosofía como saber ‘fundamental’ sobre la vida social, al cual se subordinarían las disciplinas de las ciencias sociales, incapaces de pensar por sí mismas, sino de un programa en el que filosofía y ciencias sociales se encontraban en el mismo plano y se interpelaban mutuamente. Interacción dinámica entre lo empírico y lo teórico, en donde los resultados de la investigación empírica se integran estructuralmente en las formulaciones teóricas. Con ello se produce un distanciamiento crítico no solo frente a las pretensiones totalizantes de la filosofía, sino también frente al positivismo de las ciencias sociales. 5. An earlier version of part of this section was published in “Philosophy beyond Pernicious Knowledge, from a Latin American Perspective,” American Philosophical Association, Latino Latina News Letter, Vol. 10, No. 1, Fall 2010. 6. Hernán Cortés, “Preámbulo,” in Cartas de relación (Mexico: Porrúóa, 1993), 3. 7. Ibid. 8. Enrique Dussel points to the distinctness of Latin American thought as it engages its experience and situation: “from the shadow that the light of being has not been able to illuminate. Our thought sets out from non-being, nothingness, otherness, exteriority, the mystery of non-sense. It is then a ‘barbarian’ philosophy.” Enrique Dussel, Philosophy of Liberation, trans. Aquilina Martines and Christine Morkovsky (Mary Knoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1985), 14. Also published in Jorge E. Gracia and Elizabeth Millán-Zaibert, Latin American Philosophy for the Twenty-First Century (New York: Prometheus Books, 2004), 428. 9. Of course, this is the point Frantz Fanon makes when he writes, “Le noir n’a pas de résistance ontologique aux yeux du Blanc.” Peau noire, masques blancs (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1952), 89. “The black man has no ontological resistance in the eyes of the white man,” Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (New York: Grove Press, 1967), 110. 10. I mean “understand” in the sense of withstanding and going under in the exposure in radical exteriority to configurations of beings beyond the system of power and knowledge that situates and perpetuates Western colonizing rationalism. 11. Antonin Artaud, “Le théâtre et la peste,” in Le théâtre et son double (Paris: Gallimard, 1964). 12. Codex Telleriano-Remensis, ed. Eloise Quiñones Keber (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995). See José Rabasa’s “Elsewheres: Radical Relativism and the Limits of Empire,” Qui Parle Vol. 16, No. 1, 2006, pp. 71–96. “Franciscans and Dominicans under the Gaze of

Notes to Pages 143–149 | 249 a Tlacuilo: Plural-World Dwelling in an Indian Pictoral Codex,” Morrison Inaugural Lecture Series, University of California at Berkeley, 1998. 13. Walter Mignolo, The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality, & Colonization, 2nd ed. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003). 14. Giorgio Agamben distinguishes the voice of the mature human who has been introduced to history from the voice of children before they learn to speak the language of logic and history. See Giorgio Agamben, Infazia e storia: Distruzione dell’esperienza e origine della storia (Torino, Italy: Einaudi, 2001). 15. One crucial example is Ibn Ryshd or Averroes (1126–1198, Cordoba, Al-Andalus), who is considered the father of secular philosophy and in this sense leaves the deepest imprints in the inheritance Al-Andalus leaves for the development of modern Western thought. Among Ibh Rushd’s positions three seem immediately apparent: 1. Theology should be separated from science. 2. All humans partake of the same intellect. 3. Existence precedes essence. In the twelfth century, Averroes rejected the eccentric deferents introduced by Ptolemy and instead argued for a strictly concentric model of the universe. He wrote the following criticism on the Ptolemaic model of planetary motion: “To assert the existence of an eccentric sphere or an epicyclic sphere is contrary to nature. . . . The astronomy of our time offers no truth, but only agrees with the calculations and not with what exists” (Owen Gingerich, “Islamic Astronomy,” Scientific American Vol. 254, No. 10, April 1986, p. 74). One might also keep in mind the intellectual and cultural life of Al-Andalus, which contained seventy libraries and 600,000 books (cf. four hundred in largest contemporary European library). Latin translations of the twelfth century and Islamic contributions to medieval Europe contributed to the growth of the European sciences as the major search spread among European scholars for new learning, which they could only find among Muslims, especially in Islamic Spain and Sicily. These scholars translated new scientific and philosophical texts from Arabic into Latin. One of the most productive translators in Spain was Gerard of Cremona, who translated eighty-seven books from Arabic to Latin, including Muhammad ibn Mūsā al-Khwārizmī’s On Algebra and Almucabala, Jabir ibn Aflah’s Elementa astronomica, al-Kindi’s On Optics, Ahmad ibn Muhammad ibn Kathīr al-Farghānī’s On Elements of Astronomy on the Celestial Motions, al-Farabi’s On the Classification of the Sciences, the chemical and medical works of Razi, the works of Thabit ibn Qurra and Hunayn ibn Ishaq, and the works of Arzachel, Jabir ibn Aflah, the Banū Mūsā, Abū Kāmil Shujā ibn Aslam, Abu al-Qasim, and Ibn al-Haytham (including the Book of Optics). With the fall of Islamic Spain in 1492, the scientific and technological initiative of the Islamic world was inherited by Europeans and laid the foundations for Europe’s Renaissance and scientific revolution. 16. Jacques Derrida, Of Hospitality (California: Stanford University Press, 2000); De l’hospitalité (Paris: Calmann-Leví, 1997). 17. Eduardo Subirats, Memoria y exilio (Madrid: Losada, 2003), 14. 18. Eduardo Subirats, Memoria y exilio (Madrid: Losada, 2003), 14. 19. Here one moves well beyond traditional hermeneutics, such as in Heidegger or Gadamer´s sense. For example, this is not a question of Being or of language as a totality pierced by difference.

250 | Notes to Pages 149–154 20. In other words, to put it in terms of what the Mexican philosopher Leopoldo Zea finds in philosophy of liberation, the issue is the liberation of man from a certain disposition, from a habit of domination, from a thinking that appropriates all in the name of philosophical knowledge. “The one to be liberated is not the one from Latin America or the Third World, rather man wherever may be found, including the dominator. It is the dominator of men that must disappear . . . not the being of man but a certain modality of that being” (Leopoldo Zea, “La filosofía latinoamericana como filosofía de la liberación,” in La filosofía como compromiso de liberación [Caracas, Venezuela: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1991], 293). 21. Enrique Lihn, Poesia de paso (Santiago, Chile: Ediciones Diego Portales, 2008), 14.

8. Modernity and Rationality Rethought in Light of Latin American Radical Exteriority and Asymmetric Temporality 1. The term “non-simultaneous simultaneity” comes from Carlos Rincón´s important work La no simulateneidad de lo simultáneo (Bogotá: Editorial Universidad Nacional, 1995). Santiago Castro-Gómez refers to Rincón’s work in Crítica de la razón latinoamericana, 2nd ed. (Bogotá, Colombia: Pontifica Universidad Javeriana, 2011), 25, note 4; 1st ed. (Barcelona: Puvell Lubros, 1996), 24, note 25. Throughout my discussion I will refer to the latest edition as “CRL” and the first edition as “CRL first ed.” Because the two versions differ slightly, there will be occasions when I only refer to one of them. 2. For an interesting discussion of Santiago Castro-Gómez’s work, see De crisis y paradojas: Aproximaciones críticas al postlatinoamericanismo de Santiago Castro-Gómez (Mexico, D.F.: Nostromo Ediciones, 2009). 3. CRL, 12–14; CRL, first ed., 9–14. 4. CRL first ed., 10. 5. CRL first ed., 11. 6. CRL first ed., 11. 7. CRL first ed., 11. 8. CRL first ed., 12. 9. CRL first ed., 12. 10. CRL first ed., 12. 11. I believe that it is this point that Dussel does not see in his engagement with figures like Derrida. This is clear for example in Dussel’s treatment of Derrida’s On Friendship in his Semitic Meditations (a manuscript yet unpublished, but made available to me by Dussel). In his discussion Dussel treats Derrida’s thought as a series of positions, rather than as a movement of deconstructive thought that plays out the undoing of the traditional concept of friendship in philosophy by showing the enmity that is never comprehended by any claim to friendship, Western, Semitic, or otherwise. Derrida’s thought is not a position, not even a strategy, but an engagement with the way in which the concept of friendship sustains itself in a play beyond itself by a series of relations that do not remain under it. 12. CRL, 25. 13. CRL, 25. 14. CRL, 25.

Notes to Pages 154–160 | 251 15. CRL, 31. 16. CRL first ed., 32. 17. CRL first ed., 32. 18. CRL first ed., 32: CRL, 33. 19. “The expression ‘end of modernity’ refers to the loss of credibility of this kind of account, and not to the cancellation of modernity as an historical epoch.” CRL first ed., 33. 20. CRL first ed., 35. 21. CRL first ed., 36. 22. CRL, 36 and 38. 23. CRL, 35. 24. CRL first ed., 33. 25. CRL first ed., 36. 26. CRL, 36. 27. CRL first ed., 37; CRL, 36. 28. CRL first ed., 37; CRL, 36–37. 29. CRL first ed., 37. 30. CRL first ed., 38; CRL, 37. 31. CRL first ed., 38; CRL, 37. 32. CRL first ed., 38; CRL, 37. 33. CRL first ed., 38; CRL, 37. 34. CRL first ed., 38; CRL, 37. 35. CRL first ed., 38; CRL, 37. 36. CRL first ed., 39; CRL, 38. 37. CRL first ed., 4; CRL, 40. 38. CRL first ed., 42; CRL, 41. 39. CRL first ed., 43; CRL, 41. 40. CRL first ed., 44; CRL, 42. 41. CRL, 42; CRL first ed., 44. 42. CRL first ed., 44; CRL, 42–43. 43. CRL first ed., 33. 44. CRL first ed., 33; CRL, 35. 45. The following observations by Eduardo Mendieta may serve to intensify the point, although, unlike Mendieta, I find in Castro-Gómez’s Crítica the path for the kind of identification Mendieta finds lacking in his thought. This becomes evident in Castro-Gómez’s later works, for example in his genealogy of the coloniality of power and knowledge in La hybris del punto cero: ciencia, raza e ilustración en la Nueva Granada (1750–1816) (Bogotá: Editorial Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, 2005). Mendieta writes in his review of the Crítica (“The Othering of the Other: Santiago Castro-Gómez’s Critique of Latin American Reason,” Dissents: Revista Internacional de Pensamiento Latinoamericano, No. 3, 1997, pp. 117–123): I take it that Castro-Gómez has failed to differentiate between identity and identification, or to be clearer between the logic of individuation through subjection that characterizes modernity, and the logic of individuation through agency that characterizes postmodern, postcolonial, global contexts. One thing is

252 | Notes to Pages 161–166 to affirm an identity, another is to construct a discourse about identification. Whereas the first, and Castro-Gómez rightly points this out, assumes a retroactively constructed homogeneous unity, usually a fictitious one, identification is a claim about social power, social control, about who and what has the legitimacy to claim recognition or to grant it. Identification is the issue of a differential social topography. Who has the authority and power to allow certain voices to speak, or to be silenced. Indeed, identification discourses are about representing ourselves (Darstellen), and not about standing in proxy for others (Vertreten). The failure to make this distinction leads our author to overlook the power of self-identifying discourses. The plurality that Castro-Gómez so much celebrates would not have been possible had not a plurality of subjects affirmed and claimed their own identification. Here our author takes for granted a historical process that took a long time to gestate and make its appearance. 46. Santiago Castro-Gómez, “La filosofía latinoamericana como ontología crítica del presente: Temas y motivos para una Crítica de la razón latinoamericana,” Revista Dissens, No. 4 (www.javeriana.edu.co/pensar/Disens41.html). This article is in Spanish; all English translations are mine. Henceforth cited as “FLO” followed by the paragraph number (the available version online does not have page numbers). 47. FLO, 1. 48. FLO, 2. 49. FLO, 2. 50. CRL first ed., 57; CRL, 54. 51. FLO, 2. 52. FLO, 3. 53. FLO, 4. 54. CRL first ed., 170. 55. FLO, 3. 56. FLO, 4. 57. FLO, 5. See Santiago Castro-Gómez, “Michel Foucault y la colonialidad del poder,” in Cultura y cambio social en América Latina, ed. Mabe Moraña (Frankfurt am Main: Iberoamericana/Vervuert, 2008), 209–232. 58. FLO, 7. 59. FLO, 13. 60. FLO, 12. 61. FLO, 12. 62. FLO, 14. 63. FLO, 14. 64. FLO, 14. 65. FLO, 16. 66. FLO, 16. 67. FLO, 16. 68. FLO, 16. 69. FLO, 16. 70. CRL first ed., 57; CRL, 54.

Notes to Pages 166–170 | 253 71. CRL first ed., 57; CRL, 54. 72. CRL first ed., 58; CRL, 54. 73. See Néstor García Canclini, Culturas híbridas: Estrategias para entrar y salir de la modernidad (Barcelona: Paidos, 2001). 74. CRL, 61. In this passage Castro-Gómez refers to Néstor García Canclini, “Memory and Innovation in the Theory of Art,” The South Atlantic Quarterly, Vol. 92, 1993, pp. 423–433. 75. Here I depart from the readings of Castro-Gómez as a thinker who remains with the question of reason as understood in terms of Kantian critique. Cf. Fernando Hernández Gonzáles, De crisis y paradoja: aproximaciones críticas al postlatinoamericanismo de Santiago Castro-Gómez (México: Ediciones Nostromo, 2011). 76. This thinking does not remain a purely abstract postmodern critique. For example, in his essay “The Missing Chapter of Empire: Postmodern Reorganization of Coloniality and Post-Fordist Capitalism,” he exposes the perpetuation of the coloniality of power and knowledge beyond the claims of epistemological plurality made by postmodern thinkers such as Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. He does so by showing how the natural habitat of the indigenous peoples of the Americas has become the new source of “green gold,” through the development of biotechnologies that employ the environments and knowledge of the indigenous peoples while ignoring their cultural understanding and knowledge of existence and life. I discuss this in the last section of this chapter. Santiago CastroGómez, “The Missing Chapter of Empire: Postmodern Reorganization of Coloniality and Post-Fordist Capitalism,” Cultural Studies, Vol. 21, Nos. 2–3, March/May 2007, pp. 428–448. 77. Alberto Moreiras, The Exhaustion of Difference (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), 267. 78. See “The Social Sciences, Epistemic Violence, and the Problem of the ‘Invention of the Other,’” Nepantla: Views from the South, Vol. 3, No. 2, 2002, pp. 269–285. In this essay Castro-Gómez explains that the undoing of the master narratives that organize the sovereign state and the normalization and affirmation, rather than suppression of difference, that distinguish postmodern philosophy and the postmodern social sciences do not mark the end the system of capitalist production and domination worldwide (of the coloniality of power and knowledge). Indeed, the affirmation of difference and the other aspects just mentioned only indicate the transformation of the site and configuration of power. As a result, he calls for a change in the way the social sciences think the postmodern condition, claiming that once power is situated with single individuals and not centralized, a thinking is required that goes beyond the binary structures that characterize liberation philosophies and dependency theories (282). At the same time, affirmations of difference are open to a necessary critique with respect to their remaining wedded to the prejudices that ground the coloniality of power and knowledge. 79. Santiago Castro-Gómez, “The Missing Chapter of Empire: Postmodern Reorganization of Coloniality and Post-Fordist Capitalism,” Cultural Studies Vol. 21, Nos. 2–3, March–May 2007, 428–448. Hereafter cited as “MCE.” 80. MCE, 437–438. 81. MCE, 437. 82. MCE, 439.

254 | Notes to Pages 170–180 83. MCE, 441. 84. MCE, 441. 85. MCE, 442–443. Here Castro-Gómez refers to Merck’s intervention in Costa Rica’s national parks. Merck paid one million dollars for taking samples from the parks, without consulting with the natives who live there. The company earned from these material $43 billion. 86. MCE, 442. 87. MCE, 444.

9. Thinking in Remarkable Distinctness 1. Walter D. Mignolo, “El pensamiento decolonial: desprendimiento y apertura (un manifiesto),” in El giro decolonial: reflexiones para una diversidad epistémica más allá del capitalismo global, ed. Santiago Castro-Gómez and Ramón Grosfoguel (Bogotá, Colombia: Editorial Pontífica Universidad Javeriana, 2007). 2. Santiago Castro-Gómez, La hybris del punto cero (Bogotá, Colombia: Editorial Pontífica Universidad Javeriana, 2005). 3. Walter Mignolo, Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), ix. Henceforth cited as “LH.” 4. LH, ix. 5. Walter Mignolo, The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), xiii. 6. LH, ix. 7. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Press, 1979). 8. Walter Mignolo, “Semiosis colonial: la dialéctia entre representaciones fracturadas y hermenéuticas pluritópicas,” in De la hermenéutica y la semiosis colonial al pensar descolonial (Quito, Ecuador: Abya-yala, Universidad Politécnica Salesiana, 2011), 136. The article was first published in Foro Hispánico: revista hispánica de los países bajos, Vol. 4, 1992, pp. 11–27. 9. LH, x. 10. LH, x. 11. LH, x. 12. LH, x. 13. LH, 10. Valentin Y. Mudimbe, The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy, and the Order of Knowledge (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988). 14. LH, 11. 15. Ibid. 16. LH, 11. 17. LH, 13. 18. LH, 14. 19. LH, 16. Here Mignolo refers to Quijano’s work as a site in which such conflict is recognized. 20. LH, 17. 21. LH, 18. 22. LH, 23.

Notes to Pages 180–184 | 255 23. Michel Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the College de France, 1975–1976 (New York: Picador, St. Martin’s Press, 2003). 24. LH, 20. 25. Walter Mignolo, “Decolonizing Western Epistemology/Building Decolonial Epistemologies,” in Decolonizing Epistemologies: Latino/a Theology and Philosophy, ed. Ada María Isasi-Díaz and Eduardo Mendieta (New York: Fordham University Press, 2012), 42. 26. Ramón Grosfoguel has articulated this clearly in his account of the collapse of the Latin American Subaltern Studies Group in “The Epistemic Decolonial Turn: Beyond Political-Economic Paradigms,” Cultural Studies Vol. 21, Nos. 2–3, March–May 2007, pp. 211–223. See The Postmodern Debate in Latin America, ed. John Beverly, José Oviedo, and Michael Aronna (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995). See in particular the “Latin American Subaltern Studies Group Founding Statement” on pages 135–146. 27. Walter Mignolo, “Decolonizing Western Epistemology/Building Decolonial Epistemologies,” in Decolonizing Epistemologies: Latino/a Theology and Philosophy, ed. Ada María Isasi-Díaz and Eduardo Mendieta (New York: Fordham University Press, 2012), 20, henceforth cited as “DWE.” 28. On de-linking see Walter Mignolo, “De-Linking: The Rhetoric of Modernity, the Logic of Coloniality, and the Grammar of De-Coloniality,” in “Globalization and DeColonial Thinking,” special issue, Cultural Studies Vol. 21, No. 2–3, March 2007. I should note that Mignolo finds the sense of de-linking not only in Quijano’s work but already in Rodolfo Kusch’s work. See Mignolo’s careful reading of Kusch’s work in “Thinking from the Ruins of Amerindian Categories,” LH, 149–164. See Nikolay Karkov, “Alienation and Its Discontents: Marxism, Conceptual Violence, and the Colonial Difference,” Radical Philosophy Review Vol.15, No. 1, 2012, pp. 145–154. 29. DWE, 23. 30. DWE, 25–26. 31. DWE, 29. 32. LH, 23. 33. Walter Mignolo, The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011). Henceforth cited as “DS.” 34. DS, 161. 35. DS, 162. 36. DS, 177. 37. DS, 177. 38. DS, 177. 39. DS, 179. 40. DS, 179. 41. DS, 180. 42. DWE, 25 and 40. 43. Nelly Richard, “Cultural Peripheries: Latin America and Post-Modernist De-Centering,” in The Postmodernism Debate in Latin America, ed. John Beverly, José Oviedo, and Michael Aronna (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995). 44. Nelson Maldonado-Torres, “On the Coloniality of Being: Contributions to the Development of a Concept,” Cultural Studies Vol. 21, Nos. 2–3, March–May 2007, 240–270. Hereafter cited as “CB.”

256 | Notes to Pages 185–191 45. The term was originally coined by Walter Mignolo. 46. CB, 243–249. 47. CB, 242. 48. CB, 242–243. 49. Nelson Maldonado-Torres, Against War: Views from the Underside of Modernity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008). 50. CB, 245. 51. Ibid. 52. CB, 248. 53. CB, 253–254. 54. CB, 254. 55. Ibid. 56. CB, 255. 57. CB, 256. 58. CB, 257. 59. CB, 258. 60. Ibid. 61. Ibid. 62. CB, 261. 63. CB, 262. 64. María Lugones, “Toward a Decolonial Feminism,” Hypatia Vol. 25, No. 4, Fall 2010. Henceforth cited as “TDF.” 65. TDF, 743. 66. TDF, 746. 67. TDF, 743. 68. TDF, 743. 69. TDF, 743. 70. TDF, 743. 71. TDF, 743. 72. TDF, 743. 73. TDF, 744. 74. TDF, 744. 75. TDF, 745. 76. TDF, 745. 77. TDF, 755. 78. TDF, 747. 79. TDF, 755. 80. TDF, 746. 81. TDF, 746. 82. For a detailed exposition of this dynamic see María Lugones, Pilgrimages-Peregrinajes: Theorizing Coalition against Multiple Oppressions (Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003), 1–16. 83. TDF, 746. 84. TDF, 746. 85. TDF, 747.

Notes to Pages 191–198 | 257 86. TDF, 747. 87. TDF, 748. 88. TDF, 749. 89. TDF, 748. 90. TDF, 749. 91. TDF, 750. 92. TDF, 753. 93. This story points to a field of studies that I do not discuss but that is certainly extremely important to the question of thinking in the colonial difference, namely, the question of alternative logics. Some figures working in this field are Linda Alcoff, Jóse Medina, and the North American philosopher Scott Pratt. See Jóse Medina, Speaking from Elsewhere: A New Contextualist Perspective on Meaning, Identity, and Discursive Agency (Albany: SUNY Press, 2006); Scott Pratt, Native Pragmatism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002). The issue also raises the interesting question of the development of the school of “paraconsistent logic” in Brazil, first developed in Poland in 1948– 1949 by S. Jaskowski (A Companion to Latin American Philosophy, ed. Susana Nucettelli, Ofelia Schutte, and Octavio Bueno [Hong Kong: Blackwell, 2010], 223). 94. The discussion I trace in this paragraph occurs in TDF, 750. 95. TDF, 750. 96. TDF, 753. 97. TDF, 754. 98. TDF, 754. 99. TDF, 754. 100. TDF, 754. The concept of “estar” is developed by Rodolfo Kusch, specifically through a distinction and contrast between “ser,” as a Western way of being in the world or disposition, and “estar” as a way of being with the totality of existence experienced by the indigenous peoples of the Andes. As indicated in the introduction, I intend to follow the present volume with a work on aesthetics which will have as a central point of orientation Kusch’s work. See, among other works, Günther Rodolfo Kusch, Indigenous and Popular Thinking in América, trans. María Lugones (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010). His complete works are collected in four volumes under the title Obras completas (Rosario, Argentina: Editorial Fundación Ross, 1998–2003).

10. Fecund Undercurrents 1. Walter Mignolo, “Aisthesis decolonial: artículo de reflexión,” Calle 14 Vol. 4, No. 4, enero–junio 2010, p. 13. 2. Roberto Fernándes-Retamar puts race at the center of his discussion of Latin American identity in Calibán by referring to mestizaje as a particularly Latin American characteristic (“Calibán” and Other Essays, 2nd ed., trans. Edward Baker [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994], 4). The title and theme of the essay come at the end of a dialogue about Latin American identity that had begun more than half a decade before. As I already indicated in chapter 1, note 20 above: On May 2, 1889, the French-Argentine philosopher Paul Groussac gives a lecture in Buenos Aires, where he likens the relationship between Latin Americans and North Americans to that between Shakespeare’s two characters in the Tempest Ariel and Caliban. Rubén Dario explains this view in his

258 | Notes to Pages 198–202 review for El Tiempo of Buenos Aires on May 12, 1898: Ariel represents the light and creative Latin American spirit that follows the ways of French modernism, while Caliban represents the brute and uneducated violence of North American imperialism. José Rodó develops the idea fully in Ariel (1900), a book that marks the trajectory of many Latin American intellectuals in the twentieth century (Buenos Aires, Argentina: Losada, 1994). The sentiment that inspires the three authors I have mentioned to support this vision comes from the invasion of Cuba and Puerto Rico by the United States at the beginning of 1898. But as Fernándes-Retamar explains, and as must be evident to many readers, José Rodó’s idea repeats a colonialist habit by claiming Latin American identity through its dependency to European ideals. At the same time, as the Cuban philosopher also indicates, José Rodó’s sense of the danger and violence from the North toward Latin America is not misplaced. Fernández-Retamar’s essay offers another way of seeing Latin American identity. His alternative to the double colonialist association of Latin America with Western ideals we find in the early discussion is to claim a Latin American sense of identity through its people and their distinct lives. This occurs through the recognition of Latin America’s distinct racial makeup. Fernández-Retamar’s turn to the Latin American people is intended as a decolonizing move that finally offers the opening for the self-representation and self-governing of the Americas by its people. I should note that this turn toward the distinctness of the Latin American races is not only meant as a concrete manifestation of the Cuban revolution; it also captures much of the spirit that in the sixties blows across Latin America and that in strictly philosophical terms takes its form in the founding of the philosophy of liberation. See also Leopoldo Zea’s reconciliatory take on Caliban in his “Epílogo” to Discurso desde la marginación y la barbarie (Barcelona: Anthopos, 1988), 283–284. The discourse on Caliban expands well beyond Latin America, as is evident for example in Ngugi Wa Thing’o’s “Europhone or African Memory: The Challenge of the Pan-Africanist Intellectual in the Era of Globalization,” in African Intellectuals: Rethinking Politics, Language, Gender and Development, ed. Thandinka Mkandawire (New York: Zed Books, 2006), 155–164. 3. José Vasconcelos, The Cosmic Race/La raza cósmica, trans. Didier T. Jaen (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979); Estética (México: Botas, 1945). 4. Cf. ibid., 14. 5. Ibid., 22. 6. Aníbal Quijano, “Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Social Classification,” in Coloniality at Large: Latin America and the Postcolonial Debate, ed. Mabel Moraña, Enrique Dussel, and Carlos A. Jáuregui (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 204. Hereafter cited as “CP.” 7. This is the only perspective possible given the present author’s concrete historical situation. 8. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (New York: Grove University Press, 1967); hereafter cited as “BW.” 9. “I resolved, since it was impossible for me to get away from an inborn complex, to assert myself as a BLACK MAN. Since the other hesitated to recognize me, there remained only one solution: to make myself known.” (BW, 115). For reasons of space I do not discuss Fanon’s careful articulation of the frame of reference that organizes the objectification of the person of color (BW, 109–112).

Notes to Pages 202–206 | 259 10. BW, 120. 11. BW, 123. 12. BW, 123. 13. BW, 122. 14. BW, 124. 15. BW, 127. 16. “From the opposite end of the white world” (BW, 123). 17. BW, 123. 18. BW, 126. 19. BW, 127. 20. BW, 129. 21. BW, 130. 22. BW, 132. 23. BW, 133. 24. Leopold Senghor and Jean-Paul Sartre, Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2005). 25. BW, 132. 26. BW, 133. Jean-Paul Sartre, “Orphée noir,” preface to Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1948), xi. 27. BW, 138. 28. BW, 140. 29. In contrast to this reception of the claim to knowledge through rhythm made by the negritude movement, one may refer to Eboussi Boulaga’s La crise du Muntu: authenticité africaine et philosophie (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1977). Boulaga writes concerning the vital force behind life, between past and present: “Succeeding generations determine and assess the place of individuals according to the extent to which they are closer or farther from the distance separating them from their origin, or in terms of that which reflects these origins in the present and makes them contemporary through their representation . . . Authenticity is nothing but the permanent authorization of origin; it is the permanence of original force.” And concerning this hermeneutical moment of existence he says: “Time passes and returns, the force that expands and begins again manifests the eternity of Power in its incessant emanation and expansion from its origin. . . . Periodicity is the substantial time of things. . . . Everything is alternation and rhythm. . . . Rhythm is vital. . . . It is rhythm which produces ecstasy, that flowing out of one’s self that is identified with the vital force. . . . It would not be exaggerated to affirm that rhythm is the architectural framework of the self, which for the human being of the civilization for which this philosophy is expounded, is the most fundamental experience, which eludes all of the trappings of the malign genius [as Descartes would put it], which remains free of all doubt, and which is Je danse, donc je vie (I dance, therefore I am alive).” The insight on hermeneutics and temporality in these passages is simply lost to philosophy if one remains within the coloniality of power, knowledge, and thought. Indeed, one could reread not only Hegel (as Enrique Dussel suggests in Etica de la liberación [Madrid: Trotta, 2006], 85 note 151) but also Gadamer, Heidegger, and Bergson outside the coloniality of modernity and in light of Boulaga’s insights. 30. One sees this move away from the body in Descartes’s split of body and mind and in his discussion of knowledge in the Rules for the Direction of the Mind, where ultimately

260 | Notes to Pages 207–213 knowledge of existence must be analogous to mathematical knowledge. This is also the case with Kant’s “second Copernican revolution” in his first First Critique, in which the a priori conditions for the possibility of empirical experience are exposed as a matter of rational synthesis. The transcendental turn also occurs with Hegel’s recognition of the movement of history beyond empirical fact and toward absolute knowledge. Interestingly, in all three cases there is an attempt, complicated by the sharp separation between rationality and its others, to get back to the phenomena. 31. Santiago Castro-Gómez, La hybris del punto cero (Bogotá, Colombia: Editorial Pontifica Universidad Javeriana, 2005). 32. See Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998). 33. In this sense one must ask about the extent to which the Western discourse of the other operates as a series of inclusive exclusions (no matter how sharply they affirm the metaphysics of the other over and against totalizing ontological discourses). 34. See Nelly Richard, Márgenes e instituciones: arte en Chile desde 1973 (Santiago, Chile: Metales Pesados, 2007.) 35. My observations in this small introductory paragraph are based on the fine translator’s preface of Nelly Richard’s The Insubordination of Signs: Political Change, Cultural Transformation, and Poetics of the Crisis, trans. Alice A. Nelson and Silvia R. Tanderciarz (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), xii–xvi, from here on cited as “IS.” 36. IS, 18. 37. IS, 19. 38. IS, 19. 39. IS, 19. 40. Quoted by Nelly Richard in IS, 18, from “Sueños privados, ritos públicos,” an unpublished manuscript. On Lonquén and his works thereafter, see Gonzalo Diaz, El padre de la patria (Santiago, Chile: Ediciones de la Cortina de Humo, 1994). 41. IS, 19. 42. IS, 19. 43. IS, 20. 44. IS, 20. 45. IS, 20. 46. IS, 21. 47. IS, 21. 48. Hans-Georg Gadamer, The Relevance of the Beautiful and Other Essays, trans. Walker, ed. Bernasconi (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 3–5; Hans-Georg Gadamer, Die Aktualität des Schönen (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1977). 49. “A picture used to be a sum of additions. In my case a picture is a sum of destructions. I do a picture then I destroy it” (Theories of Modern Art, ed. Herschel B. Chipp [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968], 267). “When you begin a picture, you often make some pretty discoveries. You must be on guard against them. Destroy the thing, do it over several times. In each destroying of a beautiful discovery, the artist does not really suppress it, but rather transforms it” (ibid., 270). 50. Nestor Almendros, Dias de una camara (Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1990).

Notes to Page 214 | 261 51. Antonin Artaud, “Manifesto In Clear Language,” in Antonin Artaud: Selected Writings (Berkeley: University of California, 1976.) Artaud’s last work for La voix des poètes, titled “Pour en finir avec le jugement de Dieu,” was rehearsed and recorded between November 22 and 29, 1947, and reworked in January, 1948. The broadcast was scheduled for February 2, 1948, but cancelled a day before by the director general of Radio Diffusion Française. Not only was the material of the broadcast inflammatory in its themes and language but even today the sound of Artaud’s voice, with his dissonant sharp screams and glottal utterances, is physically assaulting to the listener; as Martin Esslin has pointed out, Artaud’s aim is to create a new language (Martin Esslin, “The Limits of Language,” Antonin Artaud (New York: Penguin Modern Masters, 1976), 3.

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I N DE X

abyss, 42 aesthetics, 4, 197, 198, 220n6; Aesthesis, 198; “the beautiful,” 73; of coloniality, 200; concrete living, 74; consciousness, 114; dimension, 9, 40, 167, 196– 217; experiences, 12, 72, 74, 116–119, 142, 217; Latin American, 197, 198; of liberation, 4, 7, 53, 68–73, 99, 197; question, 84; in relation to temporality, 222n11; sensibility, 53, 68–75, 101 Agamben, Giorgio, 71 Alcoff, Linda Martín, 13, 14 Almendros, Néstor, 213 alterity, 59, 69. See also other ambiguity, 99 American pragmatism, 14, 77, 94 Americas, 130; peoples of, 104. See also indigenous peoples Amerindians, 123. See also indigenous peoples ana-chronic: elements, 211; sensibility, 115, 116–119; simultaneity, 145, 159, 161, 194, 197, 209; time, 8, 183. See also temporality; time anachronism, 129 analectical thought, 60–63 ana-logical situation, 115 analytical philosophy, 84, 94; analyticalcontinental divide, 47–51 Anzaldúa, Gloria, 85 Appel, Karl-Otto, 86, 87 a-rationality, 206 Arguedas, José María, 117 Artaud, Antonin, 212, 214 asymmetrical temporality, 8, 10. See also temporality “authenticity,” 5 Ayala, Felipe Guaman Poma de, 91

Baumgarten, Alexander Gottlieb, 198 being in between, 22, 40, 44, 59, 60, 112, 123, 177 Benjamin, Walter, 131 Beuys, Joseph, 212, 214 binary: alterity, 173; code of instrumental rationalism, 174 “Bogotá group,” 152 Bolívar, Simón, 4, 24, 44, 184; and Abyssal America, 20–23; abyssal difference, 22; abyssal existence, 36; “The blood of our citizens is varied: let it be mixed for the sake of unity,” 22; characterization of place or displacement of the American, 55; “Letter to Jamaica,” 112, 123 Bondy, Augusto Salazar, 5, 74, 108, 145, 162; analysis of dependency, 54; critique of Latin American philosophy, 41–47, 81 borders, 140, 144; border-thinking, 177, 180, 182, 183; “gnoseology,” 178; gnosis, 177, 179, 182 Brunner, Joaquín, 163 Buñuel, Luis, 213 calculative instrumental reasoning, 103 Canclini, Néstor García, 163, 167 capitalism, 102 Caribbean Philosophical Association, 14 Carpentier, Alejo, 117 Casas, Bartolomé de las, 24 Castro, Alfredo, 209, 210, 211 Castro-Gómez, Santiago, 9, 77, 140, 151, 173, 175, 196; Crítica de la razón latinoamericana (The Critique of Latin American Reason), 9 center-periphery, 60, 136, 161 chachawarmi, 193 character (origeniaridad), 38 Christian narratives, 183

275

276 | Index chrono-politics, 183 colonialism, 79, 125; aesthetic of, 197, 199; “civilizing mission” of, 189; “colonial difference,” 10, 175, 176, 177, 184, 188, 191, 211; “colonial semiosis,” 179; colonization of power and knowledge, 70, 72; colonizing gesture, 84; and philosophy, 129; temporal frame of, 207; of thought, 173. See also coloniality coloniality, 107; aesthetics of, 200; “of being,” 10, 185, 186; of gender, 190, 193; hierarchical frame of, 207; of images, 200, 202, 208, 212; of power and knowledge, 191; of time, 8, 11, 102, 105, 184. See also colonialism “coloniality of power and knowledge,” 8, 62, 99–119, 166, 197, 206; hegemonic structure of, 189; life under, 184; Quijano’s analysis of, 128, 129, 221n8. See also colonialism; coloniality colored person, 121; concrete experiences of, 140, 192 community, 67, 87 consciousness, 105; historical, 38, 39; subjugated, 211; universal, 33; Western, 105 concrete situation, 43, 99, 190; embodied experience, 49, 71; of Latin American philosophy, 48; of life, 64, 70, 74; of thought, 37. See also Latin American philosophy; life; radical exteriority; thought concrete temporality, 6; concrete temporalizing movement, 121. See also temporality conqueror, 104; and conquered, 23. See also domination Copernican revolution, 110 Cortázar, Julio, 139 Cortés, Hernán, 141 “creativity” 27, 30; Western creativity and reflexive thought, 28 criollism, 49 critique, 131, 132, 164, 171; cultural critique, 208; exposure of Rationalist critique, 131; of Latin American reason, 152

culture, 43, 57, 104, 126, 140, 145, 167; African, 113, 123 (see also Islam); Afro-Caribbean, 118, 127; authentic culture, 43, 54; children of European culture, 29; creation and recreation of Western culture, 29, 31; cultural development, 50; cultural identity, 59; cultural products, 45; intrinsic relationship between ideas and culture, 44 les damnés, 59, 185, 186, 187 Darwin, Charles, 224n5 Dasein, 56 “death of the subject,” 154, 156, 157, 160, 177. See also subject decentralizado, 157 decoloniality, 159, 181, 192, 221n8; and aesthetics, 11, 196, 197, 199; decolonial turn, 9, 109, 120–136, 188, 194; and feminism, 188; and philosophy, 3, 121; and thinking, 9, 95, 172, 194, 217; of thought, 120 deconstruction, 10, 126, 131; deconstructive thought, 9; dichotomy between deconstruction and critique, 130; selfdeconstructing movement, 130. See also Castro-Gómez, Santiago de-linking, 181 dependency, 48, 74, 79, 99; theory of, 63 lo desmesurado, 167 desterrados, 34 development, logical narrative of, 209 Diaz, Gonzalo, 209 différend, 131, 160 differential rationality, 93. See also rationality discontinuities, 168 displacement, 55, 216; of images, 208, 213, 214; of temporality, 210; of Western modernity, 112, 133; of Western rationalism, 136 disposition, abyssal, 24, 34, 36, 40. See also Bolívar, Simón dispositions, 105, 109, 115, 147, 197; affective dispositions situated at the limit of fact and reason, 72; pre-rational disposition, 106

Index | 277 distinctness, 146, 147, 160; of experience, 49; of knowledge, 109 lo distinto, 78, 93, 140 domination, 36, 43, 55, 74, 79, 99, 103; colonialist, 44; dominator-dominated, 60; “and exploitation,” 63; and systematic appropriation, 43 Dorfman, Ariel, 209, 210 Du Bois, W. E. B., 122, 124 dualism, 111, 114 Dussel, Enrique, 6, 62, 108, 109, 161; call for universal dialogue, 145; critiques of Dussel’s thought, 76; discourse of exteriority, 78; between epiphany and phenomenology, 234n17; “From Phenomenology to Liberation,” 68; fundamental difference with Zea, 81, 83; interpretation of Marx, 64; limits of, 86; phenomenological experience, 7; philosophy of liberation, 6, 52–75, 128, 175, 196; radical exteriority, 116; rationalism of, 87, 88, 140, 162; temporal sensibility of, 115; temporalizing movement of the excluded, 141; three fundamental principles of, 66 dynamic images, 200

185; shifting the epistemic paradigm, 134; social practices, 165; structures, 122 “estar,” 12, 194 ethical thought, 64 Eurocentric, 9, 201, 216 event, 106 excluded consciousness, 211 experience, 168, 174; existential experiences, 71, 109 exposure, as basic discipline, 149 exteriority, 60, 61, 62, 64, 84; proximate, 59, 72, 73; unfathomable, 69. See also radical exteriority

Eastern European, 118 ego cogito, 69, 182, 199, 219n2; egocentrism of, 104; privileged epistemic place, 143, 207; as rational mind, 102; as rational subject, 108, 156, 173, 201; in relation to ego conquero, 110; transcendental abode of, 173; as Western consciousness, 105 ego conquero, 104, 110, 127, 131, 132 encroachment, 115, 158, 177 Enlightenment, 110, 111, 112; and rationalist project, 131 enunciation, 175; “fractured locus of,” 176. See also locus environmental ethics, 13 epiphany, 99 epistemic, 103, 199; frame of, 105; limits, 147; mechanisms, 103; possibilities, 207; prejudices, 8, 64, 126, 129, 170, 174,

Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 212 Galeano, Eduardo, 192 García-Márquez, Gabriel, 118, 127, 128, 132, 145, 166 gaze, 216; of the colonized, 135 gender, 10, 166, 188; non-gender, 110; system of, 189 genealogy, 144 genocide, 25; indigenous, 25–26 geopolitical perspective, 121 gift-giving, 187 “gnosis,” 177, 179 Gracia, Jorge J. E., 13 Grosfoguel, Ramón, 14, 133, 154, 180 Guldberg, Horacio Ceratti, 7, 53, 76, 78, 162

face-to-face, 142 Fanon, Frantz, 11, 59, 70, 100, 148, 197, 200–208; “epidermic experience,” 71 feasibility principle, 66 Fernándes-Retamar, Roberto, 123, 198 fluidity, 144, 159, 165, 166; fluid ambiguity, 140 formal principle, 66 Foucault, Michel, 71, 155, 156, 163, 180 fragments, 211 freedom, 31, 121, 133

Habermas, Jurgen, 86, 87, 140 Hardt, Michael, 169

278 | Index Hegel, 4, 64, 106, 108, 145; dialectic of, 42, 142; Hegelian, 32, 45, 47; and Marxist analysis, 155; sense of a world philosophy, 4; time-narrative of, 183 hegemony: European or Western, 83, 104; hegemonic system of Being or comprehension, 99. See also domination Heidegger, Martin, 33, 34, 35, 56, 58, 126; Being and Time, 55–56; fundamental analysis of Dasein, 56 hermeneutical perspective, 84; historical hermeneutics, 81 hierarchical frame of coloniality, 207. See also coloniality hierarchy, social, 103, 165, 207 history, 50, 105, 115, 131, 144; American consciousness of, 32; America’s philosophical history, 23; concept of, 105; “end of,” 154; European consciousness of, 38; historical authenticity, 57; historical consciousness, 38; historical materialist, 132; of time, 114; of the West, 142, 143 humanity of native Americans, 24. See also indigenous peoples hybrid thinking, 161, 166, 168; hybrid experiences, 170, 173 “I,” 74 Iberian, 123 identity, 5, 19–34; asymmetry in concepts of identity, 23; non-Western, 58 images, 201, 203, 207, 215, 216, 217 Indian. See indigenous peoples indigenous peoples, 127, 128, 135, 170, 189; and Americas, 35, 45; cultures of, 44, 103; genocide of, 123, 125; Indian culture, 113; “Indian problem,” 124; “les indigènes de la république,” 14; indigenism, 49; oral traditions of, 118; thought of, 12 individualistic rational calculation, 116 inferiority complex, 25, 27, 43; as a meeting point for North and South America, 25 inoperativity, 120, 130

instrumental materialism, 121 instrumentality, 219n2 insurrection, 187 intelligence, 103 interruption, 120, 158; of colonized consciousness, 55; radical interruption, 118; of syntax, 211 intimacy, 188 Islam, 118, 127; influence on philosophy, 1; science of, 147 Jaar, Alfredo, 11, 197, 212, 214 Judaism, 1, 118 Kant, Immanuel, 106 katharsis, 198, 199 knowledge, 90; and experiences, 171; patterns of, 89 Kusch, Gunther Rodolfo, 12, 53, 162, 222n15 Latin America, 26, 120; cultural ground, 44; existential character of, 57; experiences, 151, 171; historical consciousness of, 39; identities, 4; indigenous and popular thought, 12; life, 100; lo propio, 166; reality of, 167; situation with respect to Europe and the United States, 26; “What does it mean to be Latin American?,” 24 Latin American philosophy, 1, 2, 3, 19, 29, 81, 151; concrete situation of, 48; in the context of Western philosophy, 25; double task of, 30; in a global context, 12; three problems for, 82. See also Latin American thought; philosophy of liberation Latin American thought, 1, 28, 139, 152, 165; born of a specific situation, 41; Latin American situated thought, 20, 33, 54, 140; the question or possibility of, 34, 37; in relation to Latin American philosophy, 19; struggle for liberation, 2; task of, 27, 45, 53. See also indigenous peoples; Latin American philosophy; philosophy of liberation

Index | 279 Latino/Latina philosophy, 2, 3, 13 León-Portilla, Miguel, 12 Levinas, Emmanuel, 59, 60; Totality and Infinity, 6 liberation. See philosophy of liberation life, 64–68, 71, 80, 132, 163, 181; concrete life, 65, 80, 162, 174; distinct lives, 170, 192; as interruption and transgression, 177; living bodies, 195; living force, 64; “living point,” 174; “living work,” 65; movement of, 168; mythical-ethical configurations of, 58; singular configurations of lives, 116. See also concrete situation; Latin America linearity, 183 locus: broken locus, 135–136, 176, 192; of enunciation, 211; locus enunciacionis, 59 Lugones, María, 10, 13, 126, 172, 184, 188, 196 Maldonado-Torres, Nelson, 10, 13, 172, 184, 196 Manifest Destiny, 2 mapu-che, 132 Mariátegui, José Carlos, 113, 124, 243n35 Martí, José, 22, 123 Marxist materialist approach, 124; materialism, 73 material principle, 66 memory, 209, 211 Menchú, Rigoberta, 85 Mendieta, Eduardo, 13 Mignolo, Walter, 10, 13, 103, 172, 175, 196 mixed race, 123 modernity, 112, 127, 129, 192, 219n2, 221n8; and African, Caribbean, Sephardic, and Arab cultures and thought, 149; another side of, 131; double nature of, 133; “end of,” 154, 159; at large, 133–136, 142; in Latin America, 112; modern philosophy, 107; modern Western instrumental rationalism, 3, 219n2; “modernization,” 112, 113; movement from below, 130; “project of”, 161; as a time-space of decolonial difference,

172; underside of, 134; Western, 120, 130. See also Latin America; Western Morales, Evo, 113 Mudimbe, Valentin Y., 178 Muslim. See Islam myth, 90, 94; mythical moment, 166; mythical narratives, 58; mythos, 89 narratives: loss of central narrative, 153; meta-narratives, 165. See also myth natives, 21; civilization of, 100. See also indigenous peoples negativity, 120, 132 Negri, Antonio, 169 “nepantla,” 177 non-being, 59 non-dialectical space, 142 non-simultaneous simultaneity, 165. See also simultaneity; temporality now, 106. See also history ontology: critical ontology, 174; critical ontology of the present, 161, 163; destruction of Western ontological tradition, 56; onto-historical attitude, 108; ontological attitude, 108; ontological difference, 186; ontological question, 186 oppression: and resistance, 191, 192. See also center-periphery; domination oral traditions, 118. See also indigenous peoples Orientalism, 192 Originality (originalidad), 27, 29, 31; originary character of being American, 38 other, 59, 69, 70, 103, 132, 142, 148; other modernities, 136; “other world,” 149 pachamama, 132 Paris, 95 “il pensiero meridiano,” 14 people (pueblo), 57, 68, 72 periphery, 54, 61, 74, 149; interpolation of the center, 82; peoples of the periphery, 99. See also center-periphery

280 | Index phenomenology, 77, 187; phenomenological attitude, 108; phenomenological level, 74 philosophy: analytical, 84, 94; divide between analytical and continental, 47– 51; egocentric, 134; Latino/Latina, 2, 3, 13; modern, 107; Western, 25, 35; world, 1, 4, 53. See also Latin American philosophy; philosophy of liberation philosophy of liberation, 3, 78, 80, 93, 162; and Enrique Dussel, 6, 52–75. See also Dussel, Enrique; Latin American philosophy Picasso, Pablo, 212, 213, 214, 215 Picotti, Dina V., 14 place of thought, 140 “pluritopic hermeneutics,” 179 pluriversal dialogue, 147 point of fracture, 194 politics, of liberation, 65. See also philosophy of liberation postmodernity, 153, 159; “four misidentifications of,” 154; postmodern thought, 153, 155; postmodern turn, 92 potestas, 67, 70; and potentia, 66 power, 134; political, 67; rising from below, 67; system of power and knowledge, 70, 74, 115, 125 pragmatism, American, 14, 77, 94 Prebisch, Raúl, 6, 63 prejudices, epistemic, 8, 64, 126, 129, 170, 174, 185 pre-linguistic, 109, 143, 190, 199 pre-rational, 106, 109, 160, 190, 199 pre-theoretical, 187, 190 “Productive,” 219n2 progress, 26, 109, 127, 132; logic of, 164 proxemia, 142 proximity, 69, 132; in radical exteriority, 11, 58, 68; in total exteriority, 103. See also radical exteriority qamaña, 193 Quechua, 117 questions, 30; of identity, 23

Quijano, Aníbal, 100, 140, 142, 149, 161; coloniality of power and knowledge, 191; coloniality of time, 8; construction of colonized subject, 190; delimiting moments in, 126; and genealogy, 144 race, 122, 166; mixed, 123; “natural” races, 8; natural racial difference, 102; racial hierarchy, 206; racialized temporality, 205; racism, 127; racist, 206; racist system of power, 126; “racist/imperial Manichean misanthropic skepticism,” 185; rationalist racist paradigm, 104; theory of, 2 radical exteriority, 63, 68–75, 94, 121, 129– 133, 136, 141, 216; affirmation of, 146; alterity in the sense of, 69, 187; being in, 116; inseparability from Western thought, 147; question of, 53, 77; “radical exteriority” 7, 77, 220n7; the sensibility of, 174; situated exteriority, 144; thinking in, 6, 99, 107, 109, 139, 159; uninscribability of, 132 Ramos, Roberto Salazar, 164 rationalism: of Enrique Dussel, 87, 88, 140, 162; instrumental, 174; modern, 72, 109, 125; universal, 88; Western, 3, 35, 133, 136, 147, 219n2 rationality, 31, 62, 80, 91, 128, 166, 167; and arguments, 93; attitude, 108; differential, 93; and historical materialism, 120, 127; historical origination of, 128; normative expectations of, 162; rational (mind) and irrational (body), 141; “Rationalist,” 25, 33, 219n2; rationalist turn, 84; reason beyond its pernicious forms, 110; reason’s negativity, 108. See also ego cogito; rationalism; Western reality: fluid, 173; unbridled, 118, 136 reason. See rationality recognition, 83, 202 representation, 143, 217 resistance, 134; in Latin America, 153 Richard, Nelly, 11, 153, 163, 184, 197, 208, 216; displacement of systems of coloniality, 11

Index | 281 Ricouer, Paul, 57, 58, 88 Rodó, José, 198 Roig, Arturo, 162 Said, Edward, 122 salvation, 130; “Salvationist,” 78 Sarmiento, 21, 123 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 123, 205 Schutte, Ofelia, 7, 14, 76, 77–81 self-interpretation, 57 sensibility, 72, 101, 105, 107, 158, 182, 190; aesthetic, 72. See also aesthetics Sepúlveda, Juan Ginés de, 24 simultaneity, 114, 115, 116; temporalities, 101; of traditions, 115. See also anachronic; temporality south-south dialogue, 128 space: identified as universal, 158; physical and imaginary, 176; space-time, 159. See also time-space Spain, 141 Subirats, Eduardo, 148 subject, 157; fracture of the discourse and position of, 177 “Subjectivist,” 219n2; subjectivism, 109; subjectivity, 131, 140, 157 subjugated consciousness, 211 subjugated forms of knowledge, 180, 187, 191. See also epistemic suma qamaña, 193 “sustainable development,” 169 technology, 33 temporality, 37, 39, 40, 104, 107; as aesthetic sensibility, 100, 101; asymmetrical, 8, 10; concrete, 6, 121; contrasted with “time,” 102; de-linking, 184; displacement of, 210; multiple, 101; pyramidal, 115; racialized, 205; as simultaneity, 114; structure of temporalities in Latin America, 115. See also ana-chronic; simultaneity tension between exclusion and resistance, 176 time, 37; multiple senses of, 101; “pyramidal” sense of, 114

time-space, 11, 101, 115, 157, 159, 176, 194; multiple directionality of, 114 thought: analectical, 60–63; authentic, 54; concrete situation of, 37; decoloniality of, 120; deconstructive, 9; ethical, 64; hybrid, 161, 166, 168; indigenous, 12; modern, 31, 105, 132; place of, 140; postmodern, 153, 155; and radical exteriority, 6, 10, 99, 107, 109, 139, 159; situated, 55; and thinking “I,” 74; Western thought, 28, 147. See also Latin American thought; radical exteriority tlacuilo, 100 total exteriority, 94 totalities, 78; totality-exteriority, 60 transcendental move, 207 transformations, 168; new paths and radical transformations, 31; transformative movement, 140 trans-modern dialogue, 128; “transmodern pluriversal dialogue,” 53; “transmodernity,” 62, 189 universal: consciousness, 33; rationalism, 88; as the realm of rationality and language, 145; universality, 4, 32, 109, 146, 147; universalizing, 205; validity, 35 utilitarianism, 94 utjaña, 193 utopia, 158; conclusions, 116; “end of the utopias,” 157; project, 132; thinking of, 113, 157; totalitarianism, 158 Vallejo, César, 94–95 Vallenilla, Ernesto Mayz, 5, 34, 36–41, 44, 57, 184 Vasconcelos, José, 45, 198 Vattimo, Gianni, 87 Wallerstein, Immanuel, 6, 63, 125 Western: consciousness, 105; egocentric philosophies, 134; history, 142; modern rationalism, 72, 109, 125; modern thought, 31, 105, 132; philosophy, 25, 35; rationalism, 35, 133, 147; slipping of

282 | Index Western modern thought, 120; tradition, 108, 142, 148, 149; westernized, 55; “Westernizing,” 219n2; Westernizing structure, 202 world philosophies, 1, 4, 53 World-System theory, 6, 63 Yucatán, 139, 141 Zapatista movement, 12, 113

Zea, Leopoldo, 4, 74, 81, 82, 162, 164; call for universal dialogue, 145; creative transformation, 42; fundamental difference with Dussel, 83; “Negritude and Indigenism,” 122; response to Salazar Bondy, 45, 46, 50; theory of dependence, 43; thought situated in the American circumstance, 28; universal philosophy of history, 40; view of Latin American philosophy, 23–34, 41, 44, 48

ALEJANDRO A. VALLEGA is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Oregon. He is author of Heidegger and the Issue of Space: Thinking on Exilic Grounds (2003) and Sense and Finitude: Encounters at the Limits of Art, Language, and the Political (2009). He is also a painter and has contributed his work to John Sallis’s Light Traces (IUP, 2014).