The Logic of the In-Visible: Decolonial Reflections on the Change of Epoch

Abstract

I argue that the lived experience we, the human species, are going through in 2020 is no longer an epoch of changes but a change of epoch. Post-pandemic (and any other areas of experience you could post-) is becoming meaningless in a change of epoch. My argument is based on the history of the colonial matrix of power rather than in particular thematic histories which, in this case, will be the history of pandemics and the history of the economy. Both are working together, globally now, and entangled in the colonial matrix of power, which can not be found in the origin of the universe, in Babylon or in Greece. It did not exist until the 16th century in the Atlantic, the Black and the White, the North and the South. The logic of coloniality is the logic of the invisible and it is by understanding its historical foundation, its unfolding and the radical transformations in the past two decades, that the signs of the change of epoch can be perceived and understood.