Transmodern Geographies and Coloniality: On Enrique Dussel’s Pluriversal Modernity

Abstract

This essay offers a critical reading of the work of Enrique Dussel on the colonial history of modernity and the possibility of a plural trans-modern future. Dussel’s transmodernity points to a plural vision of global modernity, opening multiple possible modes of being and thinking. I critically analyze Dussel’s concept of the periphery and the “other” of colonial history, arguing for the importance of a materialist and non-absolute vision of the other. I consider the possibilities of dialogue in a transmodern framework in the wake of the battlefield of colonization. Emphasizing South-South and North-South dialogues, I argue for a plural vision that engages both rational-epistemic practices and creative passions that are not strictly epistemic.

En este texto, analizo críticamente la obra de Enrique Dussel sobre la historia colonial de la modernidad y defiendo la posibilidad de un futuro transmoderno plural. La transmodernidad de Dussel apunta a una visión plural de la modernidad global, abriendo múltiples modos posibles de ser y de pensar. Analizo críticamente el concepto de Dussel de la periferia y del “otro” de la historia colonial, argumento por la importancia de una visión materialista y no absoluta del otro. A partir de esto, considero las posibilidades del diálogo en un marco transmoderno sobre el trasfondo de la colonización. Al enfatizar los diálogos Sur-Sur y Norte-Sur, defiendo una visión plural que comprometa tanto las prácticas racional-epistémicas como las pasiones creativas que no son estrictamente epistémicas.

In philosophical and historical accounts of modernity, the Americas are usually cast aside as an external concern. From Hegel’s claim that America is outside of the dialectic of history (Hegel, 1975) up through the writings of Max Weber (Weber, 2003) and Jürgen Habermas (Habermas, 1990), some of the most well-known accounts rely exclusively on European events, such as the Reformation, the Enlightenment, the Scientific Revolution, the French Revolution, or Descartes’ cogito to define the foundations of modernity. As the “periphery,” the Americas are spatially excluded to events that occur internal to Europe. They are, additionally, temporally excluded as the land without history in Hegel’s case; or, for Weber, the land of the uncivilized past that must be modernized and brought forward into history by European standards of civilization.

Argentine-Mexican philosopher Enrique Dussel seeks instead to reframe the history of modernity to account for its global constitution and its potential for a plural global future, which he calls transmodernity (Dussel, 1994; 2013). To do so, he situates the invention of the Americas and the techniques of domination, exclusion, and silencing of the periphery as founding moments of modernity. Here he also shifts the birthdate of modernity back from the seventeenth century to the long sixteenth century, beginning with 1492.

The Eurocentric history of modernity, the one that focuses exclusively on supposedly internal European events, erases its colonial underbelly: it constitutively forgets that the colonial moment is when Europe emerges as the central power of the first world system. ¹ Europe emerges not just as geopolitical center but also as the measuring stick of knowledge (epistemology) and being (ontology), in a world that was globally connected for the first time in history. While the theme of center and periphery is familiar to dependency theory and world-systems theory, Dussel’s unique contribution here is to consider this geopolitical organization of the world not only in terms of political power and economics, but also in terms of systems of knowledge/reason (epistemology) and ways of life (ontology).

By taking the exclusion and domination that was built into the construction of European modernity into account, Dussel works to shift our perspective to the underside of modernity and the non-European “other” (2013: 1-52). The shift in perspective reorients us towards a struggle against the global geopolitics of knowledge that silences the intellectual, cultural, and aesthetic creation of peripheral spaces. Dussel’s work echoes the pioneering thought of dependency theory and liberation theology in thinking through systemic global domination of Latin America, but he seeks to show the way in which domination and global imperialism operate especially in terms of knowledge and being, the philosophical levels of epistemology and ontology.

It is also worth noting how Quijano’s concept of coloniality arrives at similar insights into the nature of global inequality by updating and re-working key terms of dependency theory. In his account, the global division of labor and uneven development can only be fully understood if we see how the concept of race functioned to organize labor relations in a hierarchical fashion (Quijano, 2000). Wage-labor did not supplant feudal labor or slavery but instead functioned simultaneously. ² Race has a geopolitical and economic function, but it must also be understood as a system of classification (epistemology), according to Quijano. In his view, race emerged to conceptually justify systems of domination that came into place under colonization. For Quijano as well as Dussel, we must look at the conceptual-epistemic levels through which colonial power operated and continues to be operative even after the formal demise of colonialism. Quijano’s account focuses more on the legacies of racial hierarchy in coloniality, while Dussel’s account emphasizes the exclusion and exteriority of the “other” of modernity.

In this essay, I engage with one specific dimension of Dussel’s work: the notion of transmodernity and his critique of the totalizing tendency of a singular Eurocentric modernity that excludes any possible plurality. Transmodernity is the positive project of overcoming modernity’s exclusions through embracing a global plurality of knowledge and being; pluriversality instead of universality.

The question becomes how Dussel turns to peripheral subject positions and embraces the potentiality of their historical exclusion under the rubric of transmodernity. Here I discuss criticisms of Dussel’s approach that suggest he turns the peripheral subject into a metaphysical or theological absolute (like the preferential option for the poor in liberation theology). Instead, I offer up a materialist reading of Dussel’s notion of the other or peripheral subject: this is a position of exclusion that has been materially produced. ³

Transmodernity as global plurality leads also to the question of how dialogue and relation can take place across multiple geographies, especially given historical exclusion and asymmetry. I argue for an understanding of dialogue and relation that is not only the rational open exchange of transparent ideas, but also the production of creative tensions that operate at aesthetic and corporeal levels. What kind of non-epistemic forms of resistance are there to global epistemic injustice? ⁴ I argue that reason itself will be transformed and re-signified under transmodernity, while global dialogue will be understood not just as a harmonizing of positions or calling for recognition, but as the enactment of creative tensions, often through aesthetic or non-epistemic methods.

I emphasize an orientation toward the creativity of the transmodern project in the tensions that it produces with respect to the hegemonic geography of knowledge, rather than simply calling on the center to respond to justice. In closing, I turn to the thought of Frantz Fanon (2004) to raise a possible inter-American dialogue with Dussel. There I consider the role that struggle and upheaval play in the subject-formation of the oppressed against colonial reason. Following Fanon, I argue for the importance of not over-valorizing reason at the expense of the creative passions which are unleashed in the struggle for liberation.

Space as A Battlefield

Dussel’s thought emerges within a field of struggle. He escaped to exile in Mexico City in 1975, leaving his home in Argentina, where political radicals and philosophers of liberation alike faced deadly persecution in the buildup to the 1976 military coup. He writes Philosophy of Liberation (published in 1977) without the help of his personal library, which was partially destroyed in a firebomb attack on his home in Argentina in 1973. Instead, he crafts the concepts of this book from memory and without citation. He is uprooted as a thinker in exile, yet he is engaged in philosophy precisely as a struggle against the attempted oblivion of radical liberatory thought.

We read something of this real field of struggle when he writes in the opening pages of this book: “Space as a battlefield, as a geography studied to destroy an enemy, as a territory with fixed frontiers, is very different from the abstract idealization of empty space of Newton’s physics or the existential space of phenomenology” (Dussel, 2003: 1). For Dussel, philosophy takes place in the context of such a battlefield. One’s position within the battlefield cannot be dismissed as mere epiphenomenon. Concepts are carved up within these boundaries and their architecture is not innocent. They can be organized and mobilized as forces of domination or liberation. When concepts tend to mobilize the forces of the center and protect one region at the exclusion of a periphery, they become forces of domination. On the other hand, concepts that emerge from the periphery have the possibility of dismantling the prevailing system and sharpening their critical perspective as liberatory forces. ⁵

In modernity, the spatial boundaries of this battlefield have increasingly consolidated around the division between center and periphery. The creativity of the periphery was silenced and foreclosed, while the domination of the center was further reified through modern thought. Europe was able to impose itself as the center in this geopolitical battlefield due to the colonial machine of power and knowledge that was created to generate and extract resources from the Americas. In the twentieth century, a formerly colonial territory, the United States, replaced the centrality of Europe and emerged as the central power of the global spatial network.

“A philosophy of liberation,” Dussel claims, “must always begin by presenting the historico-ideological genesis of what it attempts to think through, giving priority to its spatial, worldly setting” (2003: 2). Philosophy is situated; to illuminate its condition it should account for the space from which it emerges. Like Marx’s famous re-thinking of the practical transformative calling of philosophy in the Theses on Feuerbach, Dussel situates the material struggles where our ideas take shape. For a philosophy of liberation emerging out of experiences in Latin America, this involves considering its peripheral position within a larger world-system, for one. In contrast, the thought of the center easily forgets its own positionality, retreating into an ideological mask that conflates its geopolitical position with the universal.

Thinking and concept fabrication take place within a field of conflict. The freedom of thought is also essential here, but the question is: what does thought do with the conflictual space in which it is enmeshed? Thus, epistemology also ought to account for its spatial entanglements and situation. If space is a battlefield, thinking itself draws up or retraces the map of this battlefield to either tear down or reinforce its boundaries. This sense of space is operative in much of Dussel’s work, crystallized in the phrase the “geopolitics of knowledge.” It points to the indispensable struggle in which a philosophy of liberation engages this battlefield and questions the given divisions and boundaries of political spaces. Knowledge is not innocent nor is it unconditioned. When philosophy fails to question the particular condition of its situation and the distribution of space from which it emerges, it runs the risk of becoming a sedimented philosophy of the center. Sedimentation operates through a movement of confinement and exclusion: as the center consolidates itself, a division must be made to cast the others to the outside.

In Dussel’s exposition of the spatial, worldly setting of philosophy (2003), he develops an account of the intersections of space with epistemology and ontology. Ontological space is analytically distinct but always related to epistemological space, in Dussel’s account. Ontology itself is drawn up spatially with the things that exist located centrally, and those beings that are not (not granted full being or existence) relegated to the periphery. In this second sense, center and periphery are also ontological concepts. As Dussel succinctly notes: “The center is; the periphery is not” (2003: 6).

Following from this spatial mapping of ontology, Dussel develops his critique of phenomenological space. Phenomenology is about how things appear in the world, so phenomenological space is about how things appear in the spaces of the world. Phenomenology in the traditional sense is about the experience and appearance of the world from the perspective of the first-person subject. It seeks to understand the general structure of the first-person experience of the world. Dussel’s critique of phenomenology departs from the notion that only certain things appear from within a given perspective. The center has dominated in terms of what counts as the true subject position, and this vision is blind to the other, which it places beyond its partial vision of the world. For phenomenology, the beings of the periphery only appear as distorted or marginal. Beings of the periphery are not counted as full beings in the light of phenomenological reason and vision, which cannot not fully illuminate the periphery. Thus, phenomenology frames a partial interpretation of the world and distorts the appearance of the periphery. ⁶

In this account of phenomenology, Dussel is critical of a subject-position that would be neutral, ahistorical, and centralized. As Dussel develops from the work of Edmundo O’Gorman, the Americas are already covered over by European categories as soon as they are invented. Thus there is a constitutive failure to encounter the reality of the cultures in the Americas (O’Gorman, 1961). Phenomenology is unable to recognize the being and knowledge of any other outside of itself, similar to the European treatment of the Americas in the conquest.

The battlefield of space, according to Dussel, must be taken seriously not as an empty container (Newton) nor as only the realm of appearances seen from one perspective (phenomenology), but as something that divides up reality itself with its territories and boundary lines. Geopolitical space is something that places the subject in advance within a certain region of this struggle. Geopolitical positions matter not just economically or socially, but epistemologically and ontologically. It is not just the socioeconomic position of the peripheral subject that is in jeopardy, but the very status of their being and the practices of their knowing: global epistemic injustice, alongside global ontological injustice and violence.

Zero-Point Hubris

In René Descartes’ famous formulation of the modern subject as the ego cogito (I think, therefore, I am) we find the crystallization of the formula which equates epistemology with ontology, certainty with being, while forgetting the space from which one thinks. The only being that exists for the Cartesian subject is one’s own thinking self. To establish its foundation, the subject centers in on its own certainty and refuses to assent to the existence of any external being, the world, or its own corporeality (Descartes, 1986). The attempt to return to the sensuous world will prove difficult after having discovered this foundation. The threat of solipsism, the absolute self-certainty that cannot recognize any other being as existent outside of one’s own mind, will then remain at the heart of this inheritance of modern philosophy (especially in the tradition of phenomenology).

Again, epistemic certainty is derived from the only possible ontological certainty, and vice-versa. This is Descartes’ anchoring point, the “I think.” “Archimedes used to demand just one firm and immovable point in order to shift the entire earth” (Descartes: 16). This immovable and yet placeless foundation is what Santiago Castro-Gómez calls the epistemology of zero-point hubris, an epistemology that must strip away the spatial and temporal conditions of its thought to develop its foundation as if it was in a vacuum or a no-place, the zero-point (Castro-Gómez, 2021). The ego cogito can only be sure of its knowledge and existence from a position of centering on its own ego. Yet in the same breath it must assume that the position from which it thinks is no place in particular. Because the mind is not an extended or embodied thing, the spatial position of the subject—its centering as a subject—is forgotten and instead assumed to be identical to the universal itself. ⁷ This is the movement through which a spatial ontology dominates the outside based on its own self-centering, which is subsequently covered over. The particular gets taken for the universal.

Dussel’s critique of the ego cogito continues to note that the ontological centering of the Cartesian subject is not simply an invention of Descartes’ mind, but rather one that emerges parallel to a geopolitical history of domination. This central ontology is a philosophical expression of the history of domination and the centering of Europe with respect to the rest of the globe after 1492: “Before the ego cogito there is ego conquiro; ‘I conquer’ is the practical foundation of ‘I think’” (Dussel, 2003: 3). The subject position of Cortés conquering the Aztecs in 1519 is the proto-history of Descartes’ ego cogito: Cortés is the original embodiment of this subject position of absolute certainty, one that gained his self-certainty not through pure thought but through the conquest of the other. The “I conquer” subject claims an absolute right over the periphery. From an absolute standpoint, the “I conquer” destroys the other, does not recognize the other as a human being, and claims an absolute right over their land, body, and possessions.

Dussel’s re-reading of Descartes’ ego cogito through its proto-history in the ego conquiro demonstrates the geo-critical nature of his philosophy, as it calls into question claims to universality resting on a centralized yet spaceless ontology. The Cartesian subject is connected to a history that stretches across the Atlantic, even if Descartes’ texts do not reference this connection to America in the ways other early modern European thinkers do, like John Locke or Francisco de Vitoria.

Dussel develops the tools for a philosophical critique of modernity based on a spatial re-reading of the history of philosophy in terms of the moments that were left out, forgotten, and covered over. The most important one here for Dussel is the forgetting of the spatial conquest of the Americas as the event where the possibility of modernity emerges. For Dussel, this critical moment of exposing the violent underbelly of modernity also points to the necessity of opening onto the subjugated knowledge of the other, developing a philosophy based on this exterior and the experience of exclusion. Thus, he refers to the philosophy of liberation as a barbarian philosophy since it will begin from the outside, the other, or from the peripheral space of non-being.

A Material Account of the Other

Dussel’s turn to the other and spaces of exclusion has been the subject of important and ongoing interventions and dialogues within Latin American philosophy, philosophy of liberation, and more recently, decolonial theory. ⁸ Several critics note that the center and periphery concepts inherited from dependency theory end up reproducing the very modern binaries they aim to displace (Castro-Gómez, 1996; Maldonado-Torres, 2008). A second conversation has centered on the question of whether the peripheral other is turned into a new absolute, reproducing a form of totality in the wake of Dussel’s critique of totalization (Schutte, 1993). A third question that I note here, pertains to reason and rationality in relation to the modern project: how can liberatory reason be salvaged, separated, or newly emergent against the instrumental reason of colonial violence? That is, how can a true plural dialogue take place in the wake of modern violence that often operated under the guise of reason?

In the 1970s, culminating with a book-length publication in 1983, Argentine philosopher, Horacio Cerutti Guldberg formulated one of fiercest critiques of the philosophy of liberation and Dussel in particular (Cerutti Guldberg, 1983). Cerutti’s critique includes Dussel but applies to a much larger group and movement of liberation philosophers, mostly from Argentina. He claims that philosophy of liberation is overdetermined by its emergence within the intellectual context of dependency theory and liberation theology.

Dependency theory offered an account of the systemic nature of exclusion and poverty in the peripheral world that could no longer be attributed to a teleological narrative of failed modernization, but instead attributed it to a history of domination and imperialism precisely designed to impoverish the periphery and enrich the center. ⁹ Cerutti claims that philosophers of liberation too readily accepted the claims developed by the economics and sociology of dependency along with liberation theology, without developing their own account of systemic poverty and exclusion. ¹⁰ According to this view, liberation philosophy took the categories of poverty and exclusion developed in these other domains and used them as facts from which they could build their own philosophy without interrogating them further.

While Cerutti raises an important claim here, his critique fails to account for the profound epistemological transformation that took place through the social scientific discourse of dependency, which shifted the terrain of philosophical thought in Latin America. For example, earlier philosophical discourses of positivism and modernization (discourses whose origin can be located in the myth of modernity) had profound social, political, and philosophical effects in the shaping of Latin America. Discursive struggle does not take place exclusively only at a political, social, or philosophical level. On the contrary, these struggles overlap and influence one another: an earlier philosophical advance can later be translated into a socio-political one, just as a socio-political transformation of discourse may be translated into a philosophical innovation. In this sense, in the use of categories such as exclusion and poverty, what is at stake is not a question of reducing one level (say, the philosophical one) to the other (social, political, or economic), but taking note of their resonating points of proliferation. On this note, we can recall that Marx was both a philosopher and a political economist, and many of the theoretical breakthroughs of Capital are formed through the productive collision of insights from economics with a materialist dialectical philosophy.

Epistemic breaks are not the exclusive power of philosophy. Cerutti clings to a modernist vision of philosophy as queen of the sciences in his criticisms, whereas philosophy of liberation grasps the multiple levels of discourse taken up philosophically, not just as copy or epiphenomenon, but to elaborate and exploit cracks in the dominant order of things.

A related critique of Dussel’s philosophical architecture is raised, however, by Ofelia Schutte (1993) and Nelson Maldonado-Torres when they argue that there is a conflation of a geopolitical notion of “the other” with a metaphysical-theological notion of “the other.” The critique of Schutte (1993) goes further to suggest that Dussel divinizes the other as beyond reproach and critique, essentializing and absolutizing the Latin American and the poor in problematic ways. Maldonado-Torres points out the Levinasian dimensions of his notion of other, emphasizing that Dussel’s reading of (Levinas, 1991) occurs at the same time as his discovery of dependency theory in 1969 (two years after his return to Latin America from his long sojourn in Europe). The Cuban Revolution of 1959 had broken any possible consensus on the idea of “development” throughout Latin America, and although Dussel had long been interested in the systematic nature of poverty, this theoretical confrontation of a political economy of dependency along with the metaphysics of exteriority in Levinas was formative for him (Maldonado-Torres, 2008: 163-165).

Maldonado-Torres suggests that Dussel simply maps these Levinasian metaphysical categories onto the geopolitical notion of the excluded exterior and the impoverished other. Yet, Levinas’ category of the other is a metaphysical notion that is supposed to defy all possible locality and empirical characteristics. If we could identify who or what the other is, they would cease to be absolutely other and run the risk of becoming categorized and identified within an epistemological or ontological system of the same. The other is, by definition, that which defies the very possibility of identity. In fact, the other haunts all claims to identity such that its very foundation is thrown into question. The other in this sense is not any one individual in particular, but the radical outside that calls out to all individuals. The problem with Dussel’s account, following Maldonado-Torres, is that he reduces the metaphysical other that is supposed to defy all specificity to a very specific empirical category: the marginalized poor, or the excluded Latin American (a critique that echoes Schutte’s earlier writings). At this point, philosophy of liberation runs the risk of imparting the absolutist and universalizing terms on the periphery that it precisely aimed to displace from the center. ¹¹

Instead of abandoning Dussel’s philosophical architecture, this critique points to the benefits of carrying out a materialist (rather than theological or metaphysical) reading of his concept of the other: an account that focuses on the terrain of struggle and the critique of modernity, not through a pure outside but a materially constituted exterior. This reading also resonates with Dussel’s turn to the materialist philosophy of Marx, which deepens his earlier Levinasian insights about the suffering other. Rather than reading Dussel’s other as absolute, as pure justice and pure disruption beyond reproach, it is more fruitful to read this as a material other that has been produced by a certain history. Dussel’s account of ontology is itself socio-historical and materialist. This social ontology shows how the European dominating subject has come to be identified with, and in control of, the totality, and come to reign supreme over a positive sense of identity. Levinas is important to Dussel in making this discovery, but the influence does not force him into the same metaphysical register. In fact, the radicality of these material claims is discounted by invoking absolute or metaphysical categories, which Schutte, Maldonado-Torres, and Castro-Gómez are right to point out. Perhaps for this reason, in his later work, Ethics of Liberation: In the Age of Globalization and Exclusion, the role of the material and a materialist principle are situated at the core of Dussel’s liberationist philosophy, after having written four books on Marx. The influence of Levinas’ account of the other is still present in this work, but it is framed by a clear materialist reading and not the metaphysical one (Dussel 2013). This stronger materialist framing of his later work is certainly influenced by his extensive four-book study of Marx undertaken from the early 1980s until 1993, focused on the “four drafts” of Marx’s Capital with special interest in the concept of living labor. Living labor is understood there as a key material foundation of capital that also maintains a relationship of exteriority to capital. ¹²

Much of Latin American philosophy ¹³ and liberation philosophy, especially, defy traditional disciplinary boundaries, in that they are engaged philosophies that do not abstract themselves from struggle. Liberation philosophy emerges out of this tradition of discursive struggles in Latin America that occur within political, social, economic, and historical domains. Dussel finds it very important to remind his readers and his audience of this positionality in his philosophy: the positionality is itself an orientation to the inquiry. ¹⁴ Thus, Dussel’s method is helpful in pointing to those places where new modes of thought are born out of struggle and out of an eclectic confrontation of discursive sources. Yet, the colonized other should not become another absolute center to replace the European center; instead, the critique of modernity needs to aim for a decentering of all absolute positions.

The notion of transmodernity along with South-South dialogues points towards this decentering of all centers and instead opens the possibility of a connection and set of relations that can be established between different peripheries without a center, where there is no absolute other or any absolute center. The notion of North-South dialogue in Dussel also seeks to de-center all centers. ¹⁵ Influence from, and dialogue with, Europe and the global North is not to be shunned, but must rather be approached in such a way that the North is not considered the universal source of truth and being. There is no absolute periphery to the center, but instead, the transmodern project seeks to articulate the relation of a plurality of peripheries with their own material histories. Instead of an exclusive and totalizing universality, transmodernity would be a global pluriversality, as the Zapatistas in Mexico’s southeast region of Chiapas famously suggest, “a world in which many worlds fit.” ¹⁶ Indeed, Dussel is profoundly influenced by the world-making projects of the Zapatistas and other social movements in Latin America. ¹⁷

Transmodern Geographies and Dialogues

The project of transmodernity seeks to open the emancipatory power of reason beyond the locus of the center. If emancipatory reason is to make true on its promise, it must not be limited to an exclusive reign in one center, it must be open to the pluriversality of a global geography of reason. Dussel coins the term transmodernity in his later works, moving away from “postmodern” which was used in earlier works (Dussel, 2003: viii; Dussel, 2013). Transmodernity aims to overcome the provincialism and exclusion of Eurocentric modernity, with a global and dialogic reason. Transmodernity is not a rejection of modernity but an overcoming of its exclusive and restrictive geography. Dussel shifts his terminology from postmodern to transmodern because he does not wish to reject the emancipatory possibilities of modern reason altogether, a problem he finds in postmodern thinking, and because this project seeks a positive overcoming, not only a deconstruction of modernity. ¹⁸

If Europe has historically excluded and silenced the periphery, the task of transmodernity is to break the stranglehold of this silence and interpellate the reason of the center to account for and include the reason of the other. Interpellation is the speech act in which the outsider erupts onto the scene of the center and makes a demand to hold them accountable. According to Dussel, the periphery is not the other of reason, but the site of new claims to reason, the reason of the other. The reason of the other emanates from a marginal position from the perspective of a history of exclusion and inequality that cannot be accounted for within the communication community of the center. In his dialogue with, and critique of, the discourse ethics of Karl Otto-Apel and Jürgen Habermas (itself a North-South dialogue), Dussel shows that one cannot think of the dialogic process of reason on neutral grounds, but must account for the a priori exclusion of certain groups from this field. Dussel’s point is to show that the other can call on the community of reason to demand inclusion and justice, to show that reason is not living up to its name when it continues to irrationally exclude, yet this process does not occur on an even playing field.

In his critique of discourse ethics, Dussel accounts for the constitutive exclusion of those who are not included within the community of reason. This is an important intervention, and it opens the borders that enclose the center. However, there is still a question as to whether the moment of interpellation is subordinated to the center, instead of radically displacing this geography of knowledge (Vallega, 2014: 81-95). ¹⁹ After drawing up the battlefield of the geography of colonial reason, caution ought to be taken in establishing the possibility of dialogue: here a clear differentiation between inclusion and radical transformation is needed. Dussel raises this issue in the following passage where the entanglement between the problem of inclusion (or recognition) and transformation is exemplified:

The Other, excluded from the communities of communication and producers, is the pauper (as Marx used to say). The interpellation is an originary speech act, with which the pauper erupts into the real community of communication and producers (in the name of the ideal), and makes them accountable, demands a universal right, as a human being-part of the community; and, in addition, expects to transform it by means of a liberation praxis (which is also frequently a struggle), into a future, possibly more just society. It is the excluded one who appears from a certain nothing to create a new moment in the history of community. (Dussel, 1996b: 36)

However, there is a tension between the desire for recognition and human rights, on the one hand, and the desire for a complete transformation of the system through liberation praxis, on the other hand. ²⁰ The other attempts to hold the center accountable for its supposedly universal values, but at the same time they seek to transform the very meaning of these values in this process.

In the preface to Philosophy of Liberation, with reference to his own philosophical project, Dussel remarks, “the slave, in revolt, uses the master’s language” (Dussel, 2003: viii). His own project is entangled with the history of Europe and the language of European philosophy (not to mention the Spanish language itself); he does not pretend to write from some pure outside. Latin American philosophy is a philosophy built out of a colonial history entangled across the cultures of the Atlantic. Yet, when Dussel takes up the master’s language he aims for it to be spoken with a new voice and in a new way. He aims to appropriate it, repurpose it, and creatively subvert it. To this end, the language may no longer be recognizable to the master by the time the subject in revolt is done with it, when they have fractured the Eurocentric monologue of reason. The point, then, is not to step outside of the entanglement of Atlantic modernity altogether, nor is it to create a new language ex nihilo. Instead, the point is to destruct and internally subvert the monologue of the master, spoken in the master’s terms, by redeploying and repurposing their language.

To work through this problematic, it is important think how the language of the periphery could be allowed the space of its own intelligibility without being indexed back to the language of the center. Dussel acknowledges that he is already writing in a colonial tongue that came to the Americas from Europe, and from there he hopes to decenter this discourse and spark an “authentically worldwide” philosophy. Still, we might ask, is transmodernity seeking a pure outside, or is there some other way to think the subversion and decentering of the periphery?

In Audre Lorde’s famous essay, “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House,” she argues that, “it is learning how to stand alone, unpopular and sometimes reviled, and how to make common cause with those others identified as outside the structures in order to define and seek a world in which we can all flourish” (Lorde, 2007: 112). Lorde points us to the dangers and pitfalls of the attempt to retool oppressive inheritances from within. Yet, Dussel is also offering an attempt to re-tool this language of the master, to take things into a new terrain, and to operate on a new field of intelligibility that does not require the master’s stamp of approval.

Thus, to embrace the plurality of epistemic positions that would not be indexed back to Europe, is to engage with the practices and epistemologies that have been held to be irrational or put below the threshold of knowledge according to the hegemonic regime of knowledge. We might refer to this theoretical production as an “insurrection of knowledge,” that is, a form of “theoretical production that does not need a visa from some common regime to establish its validity” (Foucault, 2003: 6-7). Rather than dooming these knowledges to modern worries about what falls beyond the traditional purviews of reason, the pluriversality of the transmodern project opens the space for the insurrection of knowledges that takes place without appeal to some common regime for its visa.

Conclusion: South-South Dialogues from The Underside Of Modernity

For Dussel, the original division that is forgotten in western culture is the colonial constitution of modernity. Dussel operates from a global horizon of epistemic silencing and ontological erasure, the horizon in which the damnés de la terre (wretched of the earth), the “immense majority of the earth” have been excluded ontologically and epistemically in a process that began over five hundred years ago (Dussel, 1994: 9). ²¹ His project aims to excavate the reason of the other that has been covered over (encubierto) and materially excluded from the history of this silencing. His notion of transmodernity points to the opening of modernity as a pluriversal notion of reason, one that emanates from a variety of positions.

The reason of the other interpellates the reason of the center to include what it has excluded. Yet, how would it be possible to re-establish the grounds upon which a true dialogue might actually take place? A dialogue between center and periphery that does not shift the terms of the center would not truly engage more than one voice. The creation of the periphery must create new modes of expression while also re-working and subverting the language of the center to escape the stranglehold of this monologue about the other.

The planetary horizon of colonial modernity shows that modernity is not uniquely European but is instead formed from the history of the invention of the Americas. This is the insight that Dussel builds upon with his notion of transmodernity. The strength of his critique of modernity precisely comes from its dismantling of the notion of a neutral subject position, and its exposure of the violent practices that went into the constitution of such a subject. In short, his critique exposes the global battlefield of knowledge. If the positive move forward after the critique, transmodernity, is to open new spaces of intellectual and cultural creation in the periphery, it must avoid doing so in a language that is simply indexed back to that of the center. For Dussel, this does not mean abandoning the possibility of dialogue with Europe or the Global North but rather unmasking the battlefield to show that it is not neutral. It also means provincializing the center so that there is not one central guarantor of reason and modernity. European reason and modernity are still included in this proposed dialogue, but they no longer dictate the terms.

In closing, Frantz Fanon’s project of anticolonial liberation is instructive and points to dimensions of a possible South-South dialogue between Latin American and Caribbean philosophy. ²² While Fanon writes from the perspective of the direct experience of colonialism in Martinique and from his experience in the anticolonial revolution in Algeria, his insights are still deeply relevant for the post-independence situation of coloniality (and decolonial thought) in Latin America. ²³ One of Fanon’s central insights in The Wretched of the Earth is that the colonial machine is not a creature capable of thinking or dialogue; it must be challenged through a violent upheaval. As he explains, “challenging the colonial world is not a rational confrontation of viewpoints” (Fanon, 2004: 1).

Fanon’s insights into the Manichean divide produced by colonialism are still relevant to liberation struggles today. That is to say, the power structures put into place by colonialism cannot be overthrown simply through rational dialogue in neutral terms. The subject-formation that occurs as oppressed people struggle for their liberation brings about a new form of consciousness, an awareness that another world can be created in which the divisions of coloniality no longer pervade everyday life. This, I take it, is the key insight of Fanon’s claim: it is not a cognitive process of dialogue that initiates the struggle for liberation, but instead the creative and energetic praxis of upheaval.

Dussel and Fanon certainly agree on this point: liberation is a material affirmation of creative forces of life that have been systematically subdued under colonial structures of power (Dussel, 2013; Fanon, 2004). ²⁴ This involves a demand that systematic destruction of life cease immediately; not a demand that is made only through a rational interpellation of the other, but instead through the production of creative tension. The language of the colonizer would certainly call this creative tension irrational. However, the transmodern project of liberation might embrace it as an essential aspect of the critical material affirmation of life. The reason of the other bursts onto the scene through the creative passions, it makes a name for itself in the praxis of the struggle for liberation. Dussel’s work is instructive here in showing that the material affirmation of creative life forces does not mean the abandonment of reason or future dialogue, but instead the opening of new possibilities for living and thinking.