Delimitations of Latin American Philosophy

Omar Rivera

Description

A distinctive focus of 19th- and 20th-century Latin American philosophy is the convergence of identity formation and political liberation in ethnically and racially diverse postcolonial contexts. From this perspective, Omar Rivera interprets how a "we" is articulated and deployed in central political texts of this robust philosophical tradition. In particular, by turning to the work of Peruvian political theorist José Carlos Mariátegui among others, Rivera critiques philosophies of liberation that are invested in the redemption of oppressed identities as conditions for bringing about radical social and political change, foregrounding Latin America's complex histories and socialities to illustrate the power and shortcomings of these projects. Building on this critical approach, Rivera studies interrelated epistemological, transcultural, and aesthetic delimitations of Latin American philosophy in order to explore the possibility of social and political liberation "beyond redemption."

Introduction: Pachakuti

1. Rapture: A "Contextual" and Redemptive Reading of Bolívar

2. Displacement: Spatializing Martí's "Nuestra América"

3. Dissemination: Logics of Redemption in Mariátegui's Seven Essays

4. Liminalities: Schutte's Transcultural Reading of Mariátegui

5. Representation: Mariátegui's and Lugones' Invisibilities

6. Aesthetic Discipline: Mariátegui Through Quijano and Flores Galindo

Conclusion: Delimitations

Notes

Sujets

• Philosophie
• Métaphysique
• Épistémologie
• Philosophie de l'esprit
• Éthique et morale
• Movements
• PHILOSOPHY
• Philosophie et théologie
• Perú
• Phenomenology
• Latin America
• Existentialism
• José Carlos Mariátegui
• Peru

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 03 décembre 2019
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780253044884
• Langue: English

Extrait

DELIMITATIONS OF LATIN AMERICAN PHILOSOPHY
WORLD PHILOSOPHIES
Bret W. Davis, D. A. Masolo, and Alejandro Vallega, editors
DELIMITATIONS OF LATIN AMERICAN PHILOSOPHY
Beyond Redemption

OMAR RIVERA
INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS
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
2019 by Omar Rivera
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 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
Cagtaloging information is available from the Library of Congress.
ISBN 978-0-253-04484-6 (hdbk.)
ISBN 978-0-253-04485-3 (pbk.)
ISBN 978-0-253-04486-0 (web PDF)
1 2 3 4 5 24 23 22 21 20 19
Para Miguel y Violeta
CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Pachakuti

1. Rapture: A Contextual and Redemptive Reading of Bol var

2. Displacement: Spatializing Mart s Nuestra Am rica

3. Dissemination: Logics of Redemption in Mari tegui s Seven Essays

4. Liminalities: Schutte s Transcultural Reading of Mari tegui

5. Representation: Mari tegui s and Lugones s Invisibilities

6. Aesthetic Discipline: Mari tegui through Quijano and Flores Galindo

Conclusion: Delimitations

Bibliography

Index
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

IT S BEEN DIFFICULT to write a book that is not rooted in my formal philosophical education but, rather, in a set of pressing questions that emerged while growing up in Lima, Peru, and becoming an adult as a Latino in the United States. For this reason, the encouragement of philosophers that I deeply admire, including Alejandro Vallega, Daniela Vallega-Neu, Charles Scott, Nancy Tuana, Linda Mart n Alcoff, Eduardo Mendieta, and Ofelia Schutte, has been invaluable for the completion of this project. I am grateful to have been able to teach classes in Latin American philosophy at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse and Southwestern University when such courses were almost unheard of in philosophy departments. This provided me the opportunity to learn with my students. In terms of this book, I want to thank Aaron Jimenez and Cat Kelly, both Southwestern students, who helped me with editing and research. I have been fortunate to receive grants and other kinds of support that have helped me finish this work. In particular, UW-L awarded me a Faculty Research Grant and an International Development Grant, and Southwestern granted me a Junior Sabbatical. I made the final revisions while being an ACLS-Burkhardt Fellow at LLILAS Benson Latin American Studies and Collections at the University of Texas at Austin.
I am especially thankful to Alejandro, who has been a defining presence during my philosophical trajectory since graduating college as well as an incredible friend. And I am above all thankful to Christina. Without her infinite patience, encouragement, and companionship I would not have been able to embark on this philosophical path.
DELIMITATIONS OF LATIN AMERICAN PHILOSOPHY
INTRODUCTION
Pachakuti
THE INTERPRETATIONS of seminal texts on social and political liberation woven together by this book open paths toward the study of Latin American philosophy. Several core themes of this philosophical tradition guide my interpretations: the political and philosophical significance of America, the social implications of legacies of colonialism, the epistemological consequences of rejecting universalism and Eurocentrism, the undoing of philosophies of liberation by racism, and the relationship between aesthetics and liberation, among others. I frame the themes in this book through two related problematics. The first is the possibility of articulating philosophies of liberation beyond redemption, that is, without positing a coming, definitive, and comprehensive event that would undo the oppression of a demarcated group and redeem their suffering. The second is the difficulty of envisioning liberatory programs from the critical positionality of the oppressed without essentializing their identities and those of other groups. The two problematics are connected because redemptive projects can essentialize oppressed identities. Exploring possibilities of liberation beyond redemption is an attempt to avoid falling into such essentializations.
Reading texts by Sim n Bol var, Jos Mart , and Jos Carlos Mari tegui in particular, and focusing on the way redemptive commitments shape their philosophical positions, I began to notice that three interrelated delimitations of Latin American philosophy became more apparent. I am referring to a contextual delimitation (emphasizing the situatedness of philosophy rather than its universality, and the character of oppressed identities as hermeneutic critical foci), a transcultural delimitation (denoting the embeddedness of philosophical reflection in the crossings between cultural lineages and practices especially across power differentials), and an aesthetic delimitation (where philosophy engages the present in its liberatory, transformative potency, and at the level of embodied sensibilities, like memory, nostalgia, and other prereflective temporalizations, as they are elicited by artistic and festive cultural events). In my discussion these three overlapping delimitations reflect the work of Linda Mart n Alcoff, Ofelia Schutte, and Gloria Anzald a, respectively.
In my analyses the problematic of redemption appears in relation to these three delimitations of Latin American philosophy. In the contextual delimitation, identities as critical foci can be constructed, fixed, and essentialized in the process of articulating the future liberation of oppressed peoples (see mainly chaps. 1 , 2 , and 3 ). In the transcultural delimitation, a commitment to the redemption of the oppressed can enforce projects of cultural recovery that not only essentialize identities but also override and curtail the critical capacity of liberatory philosophies positioned in between cultures in postcolonial contexts (see chap. 4 ). In the aesthetic delimitation, redemptive proclivities can yield a representative aesthetics of the oppressed submitted to the interests of lettered ideologies, one that suppresses aesthetic engagements formative of liberatory agencies at the level of embodiment and sensibility (see chaps. 5 and 6 and the conclusion ). My interpretive perspective beyond redemption seeks to release both seminal texts in Latin American philosophy and the philosophical delimitations just laid out from the hold redemption can have in the articulation of liberatory programs.
This book, then, renders interpretive perspectives on key themes, texts, and figures in Latin American philosophy, and traces some of its delimitations, as two integrated projects. This introduction approaches the problematics of embodied sensibilities of and beyond redemption and of the essentialization of identities in liberatory projects and ends with a summary of the book s chapters. 1
C SAR VALLEJO S ROUNDED DIE
Vallejo s poetry is embedded in a Latin American aesthetic lineage that delves into the plight of the oppressed. Enrique Dussel touches on this lineage when he discusses the tremendist Christs of Latin America. He writes, These Christs have deep wounds, enormous clots of blood, infinite sadness in their big eyes, great thorns, and a realism which is shocking in the pain portrayed. . . . [I]n Latin America he [Christ] is the suffering Christ of the oppressed classes. 2 Especially on the basis of Mari tegui s reading, I see Vallejo as also working with religious imagery and themes to explore the suffering of the excluded. His The Black Heralds begins thus:

There are blows in life, so powerful . . . I don t know!
Blows as from the hatred of God; as if, facing them,
The undertow of everything suffered
Welled up in the soul . . . I don t know!

The hatred of God names a consuming, exhaustive, and excluding form of oppression. The suffering it yields paralyzes. It appears that there is nothing one can do about it; one falls into a state of resignation trapped by a negating world. The poem ends

And man . . . Poor . . . poor! He turns his eyes, as
when a slap on the shoulder summons us;
turns his crazed eyes and everything lived
wells up, like a pool of guilt in his look. 3

Oppression, the hatred of God, is internalized by the oppressed as a kind of guilt that permeates the totality of life. Through this guilt, the oppressed carries the burden of her oppression. Yet her guilt can also express a longing to be loved by God, to be liberated, to find redemption in the embrace of a world to come in which her exclusion is definitively undone.
In The Eternal Dice Vallejo evokes a different oppressed sensibility:

My God, in this deaf, gloomy night,
You will not be able to gamble, for the Earth
Is a worn die now rounded from
Rolling at random,
It cannot stop but in a hollow,
The hollow of an immense tomb. 4

The earth, like a rounded die, does not stop rolling until it falls into the abyss of death. It does not settle into a definite arrangement. For the oppressed (the one addressing God in the poem), this means that her oppression cannot be framed within a set world. Thus, the hatred of God and the guilt it effects are never exhaustive. In this sense, the suffering of the oppressed includes the awareness of the absence of comprehensive sense in a world that excludes her and in a future world that would redeem her. This yields a second order of paralysis, one that is not bound by fixed worlds and does not seek redemption.
The suggestion here is not that all