Latin American Philosophy from Identity to Radical Exteriority , livre ebook

LATIN AMERICAN PHILOSOPHY FROM IDENTITY TO RADICAL EXTERIORITY
WORLD PHILOSOPHIES
Bret W. Davis, D. A. Masolo, and Alejandro Vallega, editors
LATIN AMERICAN PHILOSOPHY FROM IDENTITY TO RADICAL EXTERIORITY
ALEJANDRO A. VALLEGA
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2014 by Alejandro Arturo Vallega
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A mi padre Gino y en memoria de mi madre Patricia
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Introduction
PART 1 Identity, Dependency, and the Project of Liberation
1. The Question of a Latin American Philosophy and Its Identity: Sim n Bol var and Leopoldo Zea
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
3. Latin American Philosophy and Liberation: Enrique Dussel s Project of a Philosophy of Liberation
4. Delimitations . . . of Dussel s Philosophy of Liberation and Beyond
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
6. Remaining with the Decolonial Turn: Race and the Limits of the Social-Political Historical Critique in Latin American Thought
PART 3 Thinking from Radical Exteriority
7. Yucat n: Thought Situated in Radical Exteriority as a Thinking of Concrete Fluid Singularities
8. Modernity and Rationality Rethought in Light of Latin American Radical Exteriority and Asymmetric Temporality: Hybrid Thinking in Santiago Castro-G mez
9. Thinking in Remarkable Distinctness: Decolonial Thought in Some Key Figures in Contemporary Latin American Philosophy
10. Fecund Undercurrents: On the Aesthetic Dimension of Latin American and Decolonial Thought
Notes
Bibliography
Index
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I wish to thank those whose conversation and critical thought have sustained the tension of this work: Ram n Grosfoguel, Enrique Dussel and his students at the Universidad Aut noma Metropolitana (UAM) and at the UNAM, Santiago Castro-G mez at the Javeriana in Colombia, Hernando Estevez, Jason Winfree, Gino Vallega, Marcelo Caracoche, Michael Stern, Cristian Amigo, Jesus Sep lveda, Claudia Baracchi, Fran oise 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 Ph nomenologicum in Citt 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.
LATIN AMERICAN PHILOSOPHY FROM IDENTITY TO RADICAL EXTERIORITY
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 reappeared 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 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 ins