ABSTRACTS (alphabetical order)
Decolonization and Poststructuralism
Faculty of Philosophy
Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain
23rd February 2022
Pdf. version available here
Glissant and Derrida: Deconstructing Colonial Imaginary from Within and from Without
Alenka Ambroz (University of Nova Gorica, Slovenia)
We propose to analyse the dialogue between the Martiniquan philosopher and poet Édouard Glissant and the French philosopher Jacques Derrida that took place in 1993, on the occasion of a reunion of the International Parlament of Writers in Strasbourg. We argue that this dialogue is particularly significant of the relation between the decolonial thought of Glissant and Derrida’s philosophy of deconstruction, allowing us to observe the convergences and divergences of the two streams of thought. One of the most salient points of the debate the is the question of the imaginary of "legitimacy of filiation", presented by Glissant as the most fundamental and at the same time the most dangerous imaginary of Western thought, representing the principle of colonization itself. Indeed, argues Glissant, if we admit a principle of legitimacy according to which we can claim to have the right to a territory, we can easily enlarge this principle so as to justify an expansion of the territory in question ad infinitum. This is not the case with the founding myths of the Aztecs or the Incas, for example, where the principle of legitimacy is questioned from the outset. To illustrate his argument, Glissant evokes several myths from around the globe to conclude that this "legitimization by linearity" exists absolutely nowhere else and is thus arbitrary. Derrida, on the other hand, proceeds "from within", finding lines of flight within the Western concepts themselves. He proposes that it is possible to arrive at the same conclusions from the Abrahamic religions as well, by reading sacred texts à la lettre, where it is precised that “the land in question, you do not own it. You are the tenants." This is perhaps the most characteristic point that differs Derrida’s thought from that of Glissant: he argues that it is not so much a matter of creating a new thought alongside or in opposition to the Western thought in order to fight the harmful consequences of its pretention to universality, but rather of showing that this thought of One was never "one", that it was always already shaped by its exterior. Indeed, it is the very principle of deconstruction to show that "the elsewhere" (or the "other") of Western thought is always already present, whether in the ancient Greece or modern Europe. The debate instructs us on the strategies to employ in the necessary decolonization of the Western imaginary, and finally suggests this can be achieved through the work of translation.
Knowledge Production and Intellectual Instruction in Colonial Quito: An Imbricated Rhizomatic Network
Marco Ambrosi De la Cadena (Università Vita-Salute San Raffaele, Milano-Italy)
In order to study colonisation and particularly intellectual instruction in colonial Quito, we have resort to concepts from the so-called “rhizomatic thinking” (Deleuze & Guattari, 2000, 2005). The process of colonising was not homogenous, lineal, mechanic, or monologic, rather on the contrary, it was characterised by its complexity, heterogeneity, multiplicity and plurivocity. The conference paper aims at understanding the colonial regime and its knowledge production imposed in Quito as an assemblage (agencement) whose “lines of segmentarity” gave way to a “signifying regime” within a “signifying totality”, including signs that sought to displace a centrality and at the same time with reference to it. A complex, multiple and (dis)located centrality embodied in a ‘conquering reason’ that required lines of (dis)articulation as violence, evangelisation, indoctrination, instruction, acculturation, but also, art, politics, and thought. Therefore, colonisation could neither be understood as a definitive collapse of ancestral civilisations nor as a mechanical replacement of subaltern cultures by a hegemonic one. From a rhizomatic approach, it is possible to analyse assemblages of the ancestral worlds as indispensable “segmentation lines” to configure the colonial signifiers which in turn deterritorialized the ‘New World’, a process that in Deleuze and Guattari’s terms would be defined as an example of the “circularity of the deterritorialized sign.” In this vein, colonial(ising) knowledge production – including philosophy – extended throughout the conquered continent “colonial networks” by means of institutionalised power dimensions such as viceroyalties, audiencias, parishes, pueblos, town councils, cacicazgos, colegios, universities, etc., which were personified by kings, viceroys, governors, bishops, priests, doctrineros, bachilleres, caciques, mestizos, and many others. Hence, knowledge production and intellectual instruction were a line of interaction among institutions and personages that resulted in an imbricated rhizome, usually known as the “colonial period” which is torn between being a tracing or a map. Finally, as an instance of such “colonial network” the Augustinian order founded the Universidad San Fulgencio at the beginning of the seventeenth century in the Audiencia de Quito, which was deeply related to intellectuals’ instruction but also to indigenous indoctrination in the hinterlands of the northern Andean region. Legal structure and academic operation of said university will be also revised to explore its rhizomatic imbrications, emphasising on philosophy teaching as a relevant assemblage within the colonial regime in Quito.
Anthropophagy and Deleuze and Guattari through the Eyes of Suely Rolnik
Mauricio Baez (Independent scholar, Colombia)
In 1928, Oswald Andrade wrote his Anthropophagic Manifesto where He explores how Brazilian culture revolves around cultural anthropophagy. In this avant-garde text, he decentred the notion of civilization, reinterpreted the role of Native American culture and produced a significant metaphor for south america. Anthropophagy as metaphor began to be used to describe a certain form of how global south appropriate global north culture. When Brazilian artists consume European avant-garde art, they are ingesting their energy, assimilating and transforming to their benefit. That is similar to how historically Caribbean/Kalinago beliefs about antropofaphy have been described. This figure of speech has provided a new grid of intelligibility to understand global north and global south relationships outside of notions such as cultural dependency and cultural imperialism. Moreover, it has promoted certain processes of appropriation of avant-garde art and American pop culture by Brazilian artists.Accordingly, the Anthropophagic Manifesto has become one of the most important pillars of Brazilian artistic demonstrations. We can see its traces on their pop music, avant-garde paintings,and literature. Recently, Suely Rolnik (2000) has pointed out how Felix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze’s Anti-Oedipus resembles Oswald Andrade’s project. Specifically, she finds in both cases an attempt to understand subjectivity in times of hybridization and hyperconnectivity. In the proposed paper I want to explore Suely Rolnik’s ideas. Concretely, I want to explore How she has connected antrophofaghy and deleuze’s Guattari’s ideas and analyze why she affirms that Brazilian society has an epistemic privilege to think about globalized capitalism. My argument is that Suely Rolnik has ingested Deleuze’s and Guattari’s ideas in such a way that some south american forms of life seem to take a relevant place in their theory and be a key point to answer world difficulties. Mainly, she affirms that Brazilian mixed race/ mestizajem/ mestizaje implies to surpass some traditional concepts such as identity or substance and invoques new forms of understanding our reality. According to her, that is what we find in Oswald Andrade and by other means in Deleuze and Guattari. Perhaps, for this epistemic privilege of the South American and many other tropical areas of the world, Deleuze (2002) can say that “The places of thought are the tropical zones frequented by the tropical man, not temperate zones or the moral, methodical or moderate man.”
Keeping Impurity Impure: Ethical Responses to Epistemic Impasses
Ruben Hordijk (Linköping University, Sweden)
Decoloniality and poststructuralism share the following contradiction: on one hand, both are committed to a critique of rationalistic totalization and (political and epistemic) violence against otherness in order to affirm an open-ended relational worlding. On the other, as schools of thought they become increasingly bounded, insular entities (Gordon 2011; Tlostanova 2021). In the shadow of a hegemonic analytical philosophy, poststructuralism ossifies in a defensive protection of its borders to claim its right to exist. Decoloniality increasingly undercuts its ethico-political commitment to humbling Euromodern canons in an affirmation of multiple and subjugated epistemes, by solidifying a single framework with a narrow canon. In both moves there seems to be the return of a certain attempted mastery over the limit of its own discourse, strategies of incorporation or exclusion that seek to neutralize the otherness that haunts its discourse (Derrida 1981). In a Q&A after a guest lecture, Karen Barad responded to a question about the relation between indigenous epistemologies and Barad’s own agential realism by suggesting that we should not approach the question as a relation between one system of thought with another system of thought (as if they were bounded entities), but as a relation or entanglement ‘all the way down’ (Barad 2021). I suggest that the question of the relation between decolonization and poststructuralism is equally the question of a relation or entanglement all the way down to the point that we must question the boundedness and proper names of ‘decoloniality’ and ‘poststructuralism.’ This would require an ethic of decolonization (rather than an epistemology) as a constitutive outside and impure subversive element that demands a geopolitical situating of knowledge, acknowledgement of coloniality as condition of its possibility, and refuse epistemic monopolies (questioning canonical French-centrism). An afterlife of poststructuralism that affirms such an ethic would critically affirm this inheritance of decolonization as an always-already subversion and contamination to infect and undo its own proper name. Decolonial and poststructuralist emphasis on impurity (Lugones 2003; Derrida 1991) require an ‘impure impurity’, which does not seek to defend its borders but affirms the always-already of decolonial relational-world making (Sandoval 2000; Glissant 1997).
“The Ripple and the Two-Tide Movement”: The Metaphorical Language of Contingent Foundations
Eve Judah (École Normale Supérieure Paris, France)
The aim of this paper is to show that Edward Kamau Brathwaite’s work has a two-fold importance for poststructuralist theory. tly, it centrally articulates the ontological question of contingent foundations with affective and political concepts such as pan-Caribbean identity and the black diaspora, and so brings to the fore the political and personal urgency of French theory for Caribbean philosophy. Secondly, Brathwaite’s appeal to metaphor and the forms of poetry, manifested through his notion of tidalectics, offers an innovative approach to processes of becoming, contributing to and extending critiques of substance ontologies. This paper will examine Brathwaite’s relationship to French theory by considering his work side-by-side with that of Jacques Derrida and Sarah Kofman, specifically through the lens of their shared metaphorical idioms. From Parisian passages, impasses and steps (pas) to Barbadian sea-routes, shores and tides, the language of poststructuralist ontology is rooted in spatial imagery. From the perspective of metaphor, this paper will understand the relationship between Brathwaite, Derrida and Kofman not as one of filiation but rather as one of conjuncture of interrelation. Brathwaite imagines the Caribbean, from Africa to the Diaspora, as a fluctuating, centrifugal whorl shuttling people and things outwards into a contingent reality which they themselves constitute. He first introduces his tidalectic conception of dialectics in 1993, at a lecture series at the University of Kent, which was the academic hub of the Caribbean Artists Movement. This was only a few months before Derrida presented Apories (1993) at poststructuralist hub Cerisy-la-Salle, in which he projects himself as a bandit son roaming the ‘territory’ of substance ontologies. More than just a pas in the same scholarly direction, tidalectics examines the transhistorical dimension of poststructuralist ontology as well as its personal and affective value, particularly for the Diaspora. As Kofman had done a decade earlier in Comment s’en sortir ? (1983), Brathwaite’s hermeneutic praxis privileges metaphor, and his Caribbean Sea theme echoes her classical oceanic imagery. Unlike Derrida, Brathwaite and Kofman make metaphor the ground (or waters) of their ontological analyses, to pursue an understanding of that which escapes rational schematisation and traditional conceptualisations. With one foot in Paris and the other in Barbados (or rather, Kent), this paper will use the oceanic metaphors which make up the common language of contingent foundations as its way of navigating new directions in poststructuralist ontology.
Decolonizing Eurocentric Affect: Subaltern Affect at the Limit of Species Alterity
Sourav Kargupta (Independent Researcher, India)
This paper is organized around the thesis that the posthumanist theories of affect—mobilized through a certain brand of post-structuralism under the sway of European ethnocentrism—desire an autocritique that would enable it to mark the “sovereign subject” of reason with the supplement of nonhuman affect. However, such an endeavor cannot encounter its desired “species frontier” without tripping into the postcolonial “subaltern affect” that it tries to either “reject” or manage as internal to intra-anthropological difference and thus subordinate to the ontological question. As a result, this paper argues—through a reading of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak”s engagements with the fictional works of Mahasweta Devi (1995) and J. M. Coetzee (1986, 1999)—that the deconstruction of the sovereign subject may only encounter that elusive species-frontier, once it has come into terms with subaltern affect. However, the crux of this argument resides in two important and novel moves: (1) In showing that Derridian deconstruction may be mobilized, as Spivak indicates throughout her career, in the service of a decolonization of post-structuralist reason; (2) In arguing that such a “postcolonial deconstruction” might push a paradigmatic statement of postcolonial theory—Spivak’s idea of subaltern affect—beyond the stated purpose of her texts, to a certain “nonhuman” frontier. The first half of this paper chalks the lineament of its general thesis on the decolonization of “affect” with reference to Derrida (2008) and Beasley Murray and Moreiras (2001). The latter half—through a discussion of Devi (1995) and Coetzee (1986, 1999), chiefly confronting Spivak’s reading with other competing readings4—argues that without marking the transgression of (the historically located episteme by) the subaltern affect, the nonhuman affect cannot be made legible. In following Spivak’s reading of Coetzee’s Foe, I propose that the uninscribable subaltern space—both allegorized and guarded by the silence of Friday (resisting the translatability of “affect” into “testimony”)—interrupts the colonial confidence in finding re-inscribable affect elsewhere, either as colonized space (un-translatable into universalist cartography), or as the spatiality of embodied labor (un-exchangeable with the universal value-form). Consequently, subaltern transgressions remain substitutable only for the indifference of a certain nonhuman affect that both constitutes and transgresses the instituted apparatuses of intra-anthropological difference (colonial, racial, sexual). This paper demonstrates that such a thought of subalternity becomes not an additive to the run-of-the-mill post-structuralist theory of affect, but rather its deconstructive pivot (turning it around or decentering it). Moreover, the argument also offers a postcolonial conception of nonhuman affect that may only be made legible through “subaltern affect.”
Ethics, Agency And Deconstructing Subjectivity in Indian Buddhist Philosophy: Rethinking Poststructuralism from an Intercultural-Philosophical Perspective
Alina Therese Lettner (University of Kessel, Germany)
The aim of this paper is to reconsider the poststructuralist take on questions of agency and subjectivity from the perspective of Indian Buddhist philosophy. In spite of its nonessentialist and processual understanding of human empirical subjectivity, the ultimate aim of Buddhist semiotics is not an open-ended becoming, but signlessness (D’Amato 2003; Lettner 2020), including a tension between “deconstructive delimitation and metaphysical reappropriation” (Loy, “The deconstruction of Buddhism” 1992). In methodological terms, an attempt at rethinking the “subject of semiotics” (in its double sense: agent of discourse/ spoken subject, cf. Silverman 1983) will profit from Peircean semiotics, which goes beyond a philosophy of mind to a processual conception of semiotic agency by acknowledging the “generating powers of the signs themselves” (Ransdell 1989/2017 CHK). However, while Buddhist theories of consciousness and perception stress the impersonal, non-psychological arising of thoughts (Piatigorsky 1984) and the operation of “sensory fields” (āyatana) rather than a “grasping” of objects by the intellect (Coseru 2012, SEP; Stcherbatsky 1923, CCB), “mind” (manas) is the key to “freedom” in Buddhism. Not unlike the postmodernist refusal “to discover the origin of the self” as “the road to authenticity” (Cahoone 1996), the Buddhist “search for cognitive grounds or origins” concludes that “the origin is, in fact, a trace (saṃskāra)” (Lusthaus 2002). Thus, even without being a foundational subject, the empirical and thus karmically conditioned subject is seen to influence its own constituting processes and structures: i.e. by means of causally reciprocal feedback processes between cognition (vijñāna) and the psychophysical conditioning of the saṃskāras, which operate as both constructed and constructing formations (Waldron 2003). Not unlike the critique of logocentrism, Yogācāra as Buddhist phenomenology par excellence (Lusthaus 2002) diagnoses not only the “runaway recursivity” of language and “conceptual proliferation” (prapañca) (Waldron 2002), but the “play of a linguistic-cognitive web of closure” and its karmic economy of appropriational habits. The related analysis of subliminal, unconscious and latent tendencies links up well with the psychoanalytic entanglement between language, subjectivity and the unconscious. In the realm of ethics and a karmically informed theory of agency (cf. Garfield 2006, “Buddhist ethics”), the challenge and benefit is to understand how “the action that is best for the agent and the action that is best for all beings will coincide” (Goodman 2017, SEP). In keeping with its epistemo-ethics and soteriology, “Buddhism is concerned with Seeing, not Being” (Lusthaus 2002)! Evaluating its potential for reconsidering poststructuralism can start from here.
Can Poststructuralism Critique Itself? Developing Foucauldian Ethics to Supersede the Eurocentrism of Biopolitics
Peter Marshall (University of Kent, England)
Spivak makes the argument that there is no self-criticism in Foucault’s work, which offers a theory of a universal Eurocentric theory of power. In this paper I shall argue that Spivak is correct to note that explicit geo-political self-critique is not found in Foucault’s work, but that Foucault’s later work on ethics fundamentally challenges this criticism. Through an examination of contemporary discussions surrounding ecological resistance movements, I shall trace the problems with essentialism as they emerge in the work of Foucault and Foucauldians. This will be done through examining the technique Coleman and Rosenow’s develop in concurrence with Spivak, the ‘double move’. This technique works by having Western academics allow their ontological assumptions to be transformed by Indigenous, non-Western, and identity-based forms of resistance, whilst retaining a critical gesture towards these resistances where they rely on essentialist claims. In doing so, I will note two interconnected problems. Firstly, Coleman and Rosenow aim to avoid legislating for resistance, as to do so would be to universalise their Western perspective. However, the double move is necessarily a legislative one; resistance has to transform one’s relationship with the environment in order to be considered valuable. This, secondly, is not strong enough to reject fascist politics as illegitimate modes of resistance. Eco-fascism resists the current political order, as well as transforms the traditional understanding of both fascism and environmentalism. Coleman and Rosenow fail to see that they are engaging in a legitimising process, and do not theorise strong enough barriers to challenge essentialist resistance. As such, I argue that a basis for such a self-transformative project must rely on a kind of ethical self-cultivation as described in Foucault’s later works. This ethics of de-individualisation actively works to challenge the barriers of the self, whilst recognising its own positionality. It does not appeal to a ‘good’ technique, and the ethical self isn’t universal. Rather, various techniques can be utilised to challenge different forms of essentialism and domination when they emerge. Domination here is using power to restrict other power relations being exercised, and there is not a single mode of domination. Instead, domination emerges differently in different periods, and self-cultivation works to prepare oneself for this difference. This allows for the exclusion of fascistic modes of resistance, whilst avoiding a return to essentialist legislation. Techniques such as the double move are valuable for decolonizing Western Foucauldian thought, but as a de-individualising technique.
If Decolonization is not a Metaphor, What is it Then?
Juan Felipe Miranda Medina (Universidad Católica San Pablo, Peru)
In their influential paper “Decolonization is not a Metaphor” Tuck and Yang argue for a specific kind of colonialism which they refer to as “settler colonialism” that relies on the triadic structure of settler-native-slave. While I subscribe their main premise, namely that decolonization should not be regarded as identical to any kind of struggle for an improvement in society, in this work I explain why Tuck and Yang's views can be deeply problematic. The key issues to be addressed are: (1) whether the settler- native-slave model can adequately account for the cultural-historical dynamics nearly 500 years after Western colonization took place in the Americas, (2) whether decolonization can be reduced to the problem of distribution of land, as Tuck and Yang suggest, (3) their unforunate missreading of Paulo Freire’s work and legacy, and the understatement of Freire’s importance to the project of decolonization and social justice in Latin America and the world. Furthermore, in this work I bring forward praxis as a powerful concept that sets Freire apart from an allegedly “intellectualist” view of transformation that relies on critical consciousness only. I explain how praxis results from complex subjective and objective interdependencies between a subject and their world, and how it projects itself as a struggle [una lucha] to increase the capacity of action of a community or collective. In addition, I complement Freire’s account of praxis with Aristotle’s view of praxis as constrasted with poiesis (productive, goal-oriented action). Finally, I propose an enhancement to Freire's dichotomy of oppressor–oppressed by complementing it with the notion of decolonial matrix, which allows us to understand how a subject can have the positionality of an oppressor in some dimensions of the matrix, in spite of having the position of oppressed in others. Contrary to Tuck and Yang’s view, I argue that decolonization should be construed as integrated to other projects of social transformation. Its outcome, however, cannot be reduced to the redistribution of territory, but rather to the development of a capacity of transformation of a group of people to shape the world in which they wish to live. If decolonization is not a metaphor, what is it then? It ought to be the development of situated, flexible praxis for social transformation.
Repurposing the Postmodern: On the Viability of Post-structures in the Postcolonial
Divya Mehta (University of Delhi, India)
My paper seeks to examine the relevance of Poststructuralist ideas -- in the form of what has been understood and theorized as Postmodernist literary and narrative expression -- for an understanding of post-colonial history with reference to anti-colonial resistance, nation-formation, and internecine conflict. Using as a case study the representation in Nuruddin Farah's Maps (1986) of the Ogaden War of 1977-78 fought between Somalia and Ethiopia, I will explore the novel's recourse to a Postmodernist narrative organization to describe and interrogate the specific construction of national borders and identities in that context. Through this, questions concerning the suitability, appropriateness and resonance of Western epistemological and ontological procedures in a post-colonial African context — and their possible convergences with that context — will be worked out and addressed. What is the value of such a representation? And whether the complexity of representation in the novel is contained thus? In other words, how helpful ultimately is a repurposed and recontextualized Postmodernism in furthering our understanding of the post-colonial predicament? In particular, our understanding of the conflicts around identity markers of ethnicity and nation — and attendant discourses of gender and sexuality — in a post-colonial society in search of its identity. I examine how, countering foundational claims of an ethnic nationalism, ideas of difference, hybridity, liminality and ambivalence operate in the text. Also, how notions of the Subject are challenged in the text to problematise the stable self and story, and by implication, the metanarratives and justifications of civil war and xenophobia which have often accompanied the journeys made by emerging and now established ‘third world’ nation-states. Reading theoretical debates on the viability of a crossover aesthetics, my paper will also draw attention to the fraught issue of the authenticity of cultural and historical experience, and what that might mean for reading for Poststructuralist concepts, or for Postmodernism, in the Postcolonial. To be considered is to what extent histories and structures of thought are translatable into post-structures. My paper proposes to address these and related questions.
Decolonizing the Syllabus: The Name and End of Deconstruction
Cillian Ó Fathaigh (Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain)
At a 1978 conference in Benin, Jacques Derrida put forward a shared problematic between decolonization and deconstruction: ‘how to do something more and different than inverting and (thus) reappropriating?’ (Du droit a la philosophie, 1990: 160). By this, Derrida pointed to the need for both movements to overthrow a current system or context, but to do so without repeating the same ideas or gestures which belong to those systems. Curiously, this text is entitled “The Crisis of Philosophical Teaching”, and in it Derrida argues for the potential of a new relation to philosophy through decolonization, “a new relation to the philosophical” (Ibid.). Such a relation is also of fundamental interest to deconstruction and if something like this has emerged in recent years, it has been largely a result of movements to decolonize the syllabus. Yet, to date, inadequate attention has been paid to the precise relationship between deconstruction and new efforts to decolonize the philosophical canon. Drawing on Derrida’s 1978 text, this paper will elaborate this connection, both expanding and problematising Derrida’s original position. The first part of this talk will support the close link between deconstruction and decolonization, arguing that deconstruction provides a valuable resource to decolonize the syllabus. The second part will consider how deconstruction can help avoid traps of essentialism that may emerge in the construction of an alternative syllabus, or what Derrida labels “the auto-repetition of Western philosophy” (Ibid.). In spite of this, in the third part, I will argue that decolonizing the syllabus poses a substantial problem for deconstruction, and particularly Derrida’s genealogical approach. This is not only due to Derrida’s privileging of the Enlightenment in his philosophical positions, but more substantially because of the central role that the “name” in general plays in Derrida’s work. I will therefore argue that decolonizing the syllabus presents an important problem for deconstruction and one which opens up the potential to generate new articulations of deconstruction.
“The Crisis of the Crisis”: Deconstruction and Decolonization
Carmen de Schryver (Northwestern University/Sarah Lawrence College, USA)
Derrida insists time and time again that his philosophical interventions operate at the “margins of philosophy”, that rather than straightforwardly belonging to the European philosophical canon, deconstruction attempts an opening to what is beyond or outside that canon. Claims like these have unfortunately enjoyed little uptake in the literature; instead, Derrida has been largely understood as critical of but working squarely within the heritage of European philosophy. This has led some commentators to the view that Derrida can have little relevance to the task of a decolonization of philosophy, inasmuch as one of its central demands is an interrogation of the now sterile assumption that “European philosophy” is a tautology. Robert Bernasconi, for example, claims that “insofar as Western metaphysics has from the outset been deconstruction’s primary object, deconstruction has little use for what falls outside Western metaphysics”. In this paper, I challenge this orthodoxy by unpacking Derrida’s claim that deconstruction, like decolonization, attempts to move beyond European philosophy’s tradition of self-critique. This paper proceeds by way of an exegetical investigation into Derrida’s writings on the theme of philosophical crisis. In one of his few explicit engagements with African Philosophy, Derrida identifies deconstruction (and, significantly, decolonization) no longer with a crisis of Europe or a crisis of philosophical universality, but with a moment in which the very notion of crisis as it has been deployed in the European philosophical tradition itself comes into crisis. Derrida thus understands deconstruction decolonization to be dealing with what he calls “the crisis of the crisis”, with a moment in which the crisis of European philosophy can no longer be overcome by resolutions drawn from within that same tradition. Linking Husserl’s classical notion of “crisis” to krinein – to decision – and noting that the resolution for the Husserlian crisis is decided in advance, for the cure lies in the well-charted terrain of the European philosophical inheritance, the “crisis of the crisis” is instead a moment of undecidability, oriented as it is to what is “outside” this inheritance. 2 Drawing on Seloua Luste Boulbina’s understanding of the Colony as philosophy’s paradigmatic outside, I thus argue that deconstruction and decolonization are allied in the attempt to constitute an opening towards a questioning of the European philosophical canon – and thus its claims to universality –from the perspective of that which it has itself constituted as its outside.
The Uninvited Guest: Hospitality, Responsibility, and Possibility
Becky Vartabedian (Regis University, USA)
This paper considers the figure of the uninvited guest, seated in Deleuze’s notion of the assemblage, a concept at the heart of contemporary posthuman and new materialist discourses. I use resources in Plato’s Crito, Kant’s On Perpetual Peace, and Derrida’s cornerstone considerations in On Hospitality to elaborate the guest-position. Together, these ideas facilitate understanding of the guest as embedded in the place of welcome, in the assemblage and network of connections it facilitates among humans and non-human others alike. To be embedded as a guest is also to be subject to an asymmetry in which the guest does not have the full standing, access, or identification one might enjoy in their home community. Being a guest is often recognized as a response to an invitation or a gesture of welcome extended by a host, with certain conditions attending to that welcome. However, uninvited guests – for example, those of us living on unceded lands and/or white professionals moving into and transforming what have traditionally been communities of color – have neither an invitation, nor a sense of what our arrival means in the already-established context. Uninvited guests, I contend are shaped by processes of settler colonialism and the phenomenon of gentrification, in which the embedding goes unacknowledged and is accompanied by an outsized expectation of access to lands, goods, and services. I discuss these processes and their roles in facilitating an influx of uninvited guests in my home locality of Denver, Colorado (USA), where gentrification and its attendant pressures have been widespread and fast-moving since the 2008 financial crisis. To address the challenges posed by this cross of settler colonialism and gentrification, which an assemblage and the tradition of philosophical inquiry I take up are limited in their capacities to address, I examine recent critiques of posthumanism and new materialism by Axelle Karera. Karera (2019) emphasizes the temporal dimension of these contemporary extensions of post-structuralist thinking, noting their futural tendencies to establish a disavowal and erasure of racial antagonisms in service of the kinds of solidarity these affirm. Karera argues that a backward-looking dimension is required to address these lacunae in Anthropocenean discourses, requiring attention to questions like “how did we end up here, and who is responsible?” (Karera 2019, 43). Karera’s questions interrupt the entitlement of the uninvited guest by insisting on the value of specific spatial and temporal inquiries that recognize and assess the role of racial and economic inequities already operative in the site of arrival. The attention that Karera’s questions require are invitations that the uninvited guest is obligated to take up to establish the robust and unfolding solidarity a cosmopolitan political community requires.
Glissant on the (De)colonisation of Time
David Ventura (Royal Holloway: University of London, England)
Writing in the wake of traditional phenomenology and its focus on lived experiences of time, many key poststructural figures sought to think about what it means to live in time. Indeed, the poststructural canon not only provides extensive and highly nuanced ontological accounts of the non-linear functioning of time (e.g. Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition), but also contains a number of ethical suggestions as to how time might be lived differently, and more positively, by human beings (e.g. Derrida’s Spectres of Marx). Though some postcolonial and decolonial thinkers have been critical of the presuppositions that underlie such poststructural rethinkings of time (e.g. Bhabha’s critique of Foucault), there are nonetheless some vital resonances between these differing approaches to temporality. This resonance is particularly well-exemplified in the work of the Martinican poet and philosopher Édouard Glissant. Indeed, throughout his writings, Glissant not only agrees with poststructuralist thinkers that time is not essentially a linear or progressive ontological structure, but also insists on the ethical importance of finding ways “to live not only another rhythm but [also] another notion of time” (1987: 161). In contrast to key poststructuralists like Deleuze and Foucault, however, Glissant specifically relates the notion of a linear time, and the ethics of living time otherwise, to the violent history of Western colonisation. As he writes in Caribbean Discourse: “One of the most disturbing consequences of colonisation could well be this notion of a single [linear] History, and therefore of power, which has been imposed on others by the West” (1987: 93). Moreover, Glissant argues, it is against or beyond this illusory notion of a single historical time that a positive ethics must direct itself. Such an ethics, he writes, must work “to save us from the belief that History is the first and most basic dimension of human experience, a belief inherited from the West and imposed by it” (84). In this paper, I read these Glissantian suggestions as pushing the poststructural focus on temporality in a radical new direction, and I engage with Glissant’s work in order to answer the following two questions: How does Glissant’s focus on Western colonisation recast the poststructural ethical suggestion that we must learn to live time differently? If time has historically been colonised by the West, by what practices can it be decolonised today?
Already Existing Decolonial Poststructuralism?
Maxwell Woods (Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez, Chile)
There is no need to decolonize poststructuralism because it’s already been decolonized. This is the simple thesis of this presentation. On the face of it, the argument seems foolhardy insofar as decolonial theory, especially from Latin America during the 2000s, fiercely argued for the strict separation between poststructuralist and decolonial theory. As Walter Mignolo has repeatedly argued, decoloniality requires we shift the geography of reason by amplifying ancestral Indigenous and Black epistemologies especially of the Global South, hence Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o’s insistence that decolonizing the mind means embracing Indigenous cultures, epistemologies, and languages against those of (former) colonizers. As Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang put it: decolonization is not a metaphor. Decolonization does not mean equality for Indigenous subjects within a settler colonial government, culture, and epistemology (Mapuche rights in Chile; Navajo rights in the United States; etc.); decolonization is the abolition of those settler colonial apparatuses and the recuperation Indigenous ones. In this understanding, to speak of a decolonial poststructuralism is a contradiction. In addition to the recuperation of Indigenous lands, decolonization means the empowerment of ancestral Indigenous epistemologies, not the inclusion of Indigenous voices within poststructuralism. Such a clear-cut argument, however, is to ignore one of the most important decolonial theoretical collectives of the twentieth century: the South Asian Subaltern Studies Group. Although this group has come to be known for being the founders of postcolonial (to the contrary of decolonial) theory, this understanding is to forget that the primary task of the group was an internal critique of South Asian decolonization and its elitist nationalism. To achieve this argument, some, especially Gayatri Spivak, appealed to poststructuralist methodologies. Through an analysis of the work of Gayatri Spivak, this presentation will argue that a decolonial postructuralism has already been developed through the South Asian Subaltern Studies Group’s analysis of decolonization. In short, there is no need to ask whether we can decolonize poststructuralism; instead, what is needed is the development of already existing decolonial postructuralism.