CartLimits of Decolonial Reason:
Modernity, Universality, and Gnoseological Critique Instructor: Daniel SacilottoProgram: Critical Philosophy, Transdiciplinary Studies, Sociopolitical Thought, Intercentric Art & Curatorial PracticeCredit(s): 1Date: May 28, June 4, 11,18Time: 14:00-16:30 ET
DESCRIPTION: This Seminar assesses the major conceptual contributions and limitations of the so-called “modernity-coloniality” movement in Latin America from a philosophical standpoint. It examines the major theses elaborated by this movement while diagnosing the internal fissures that open decolonial thought beyond the original tenets adopted by its foundational figures and their guiding methodological strictures. Above all, the Seminar explores the purported extension of the critique of Eurocentric reason advanced by historicist thinkers since the 1940s, and by the philosophy of liberation since the 1970s, to interrogate the methodological foundations of Western epistemology and “occidentalism” in its complicity with the coloniality of knowing and power that accompanies the institution of the “modern world-system,” as described by Immanuel Wallerstein.
First Session / In the first, introductory session, we depart from a retrospective localization of the “decolonial turn” through a genealogical reconstruction of Latin Americanist thought in the twentieth century. We then consider some of the foundational texts published in the 2000 collection Colonialidad del Saber (Coloniality of Knowledge), which functioned as a first definitive collective statement for the movement. In particular, we focus on foundational texts by Aníbal Quijano and Enrique Dussel, which also clarify the continuity with and departure from the liberationist program in its sociological and historical aspects. In this context, we find the concepts of the coloniality of power and knowing become explicitly elaborated and belabored as an extension of the critique of Eurocentrism.
Second Session / We focus on Walter Mignolo, Catherine Walsh, and Ramón Grosfoguel’s critique of Western epistemologies in the name of a gnoseological critique that would rehabilitate non-Western gnoses, and their critique of universalism in the name of a pluriversalist perspective. We interrogate the protracted reconstruction of Western philosophical modernity in its complicity with the coloniality of knowing, which conditions the challenge to universalism as a covert Eurocentrism, as well as the methodological coherence of the subordination of ontology to epistemology.
Third Session / We examine an alternative trajectory of decolonial thought that resists the wholesale denunciation of modernity as inextricably bound to coloniality defended by Mignolo and others. First, we focus on the genealogical critique adopted by Santiago Castro-Gómez, inspired by Foucault, who, in El tonto y los canallas, proposes a retrospective delineation of the depoliticizing effects of the abandonment of universality in the aforementioned vectors of decolonial thought. Second, we focus on Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui’s trenchant critique of the complicity between the adoption of decolonial thought within the Anglo-Saxon academy as symptomatic of a nefarious complicity with neoliberal constituency in its distance from, if not hostility to, insurgent popular movements.
Fourth Session / We examine the recent attempts to formulate an alternative mode of decolonial thought that would not only rehabilitate the possibility of a modernity without coloniality, but also of a universalism without Eurocentrism. Focusing on the work of Gabriel Catren, we see a program for a reconstituted systematic philosophy that reactivates the universalist spirit of the early twentieth-century Latin Americanist project while traversing its residual humanist, anthropocentric, and Eurocentric elements. At the same time, we evaluate the extent to which such a program risks relapsing into a pre-critical metaphysical program that elides the development of Latin American consciousness since the historicist turn of the 1940s.
IMAGE: Jatiwangi art Factory (JaF), New Rural Agenda, 2022
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